


REM-DAC

by clotpolesonly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Canonical Character Death, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Medical Experimentation, Recreational Drug Use, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Stiles & Braeden Friendship, Technopathy, mild body dysmorphia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-02-12 17:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12964635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly
Summary: Derek had a lot of questions, but the most concerning by far was: “What the hell is a rem-dac?”Kira and Lydia exchanged a loaded look that did absolutely nothing to reassure him. Lydia flipped her hair over her shoulder, settled that unsettling white gaze on him, and said, “It’s a colloquial abbreviation of ‘remote deactivation device’. Which is a polite euphemism for a device that a secondary party can use to terminate you at will and from any distance.”"In trying to remove the activated device,” Kira went on, “there’s every chance that it would release the rest of the poison into your system.”“And kill you,” Lydia finished for her. “But there’s another way.”“Not if we don’t have a ‘path,” Kira said, voice suddenly low like she thought that would keep Derek from hearing. “Which we don’t.”Lydia hummed thoughtfully. The white rings of her memory mods glowed brighter, nearly eclipsing the rest of her eyes entirely as she reviewed whatever footage or data she had stored there. “We might,” she said.“What?” Kira asked. “Who?”“Stiles.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (I had so much trouble with the tagging for this fic, everything's a little jumbled up there. If anyone wants clarification for some of the tags, I'll leave them in the notes at the end.)
> 
> This is my first foray into cyberpunk or futuristic anything, so take all my pseudo-science techno-babble with a massive grain of salt for the sake of your sanity, lol. It was super fun to write though and ended up a whole lot bigger and longer than I expected it to (whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, my friend). I'm _so close_ to being finished!!! I'm gonna have the rest of it posted for you really really soon I swear!!

It was hard to tell where he was going when everything was the same featureless stretch of matte chrome, and even harder when his vision was still blurred and his limbs clumsy. Derek's bare shoulder scraped along the wall as he forced himself onward.  Lengths of chain trailed along the ground behind him from the thick padded cuffs around his wrists, and he had the feeling that they'd have been throwing sparks if the floors had been a rougher material. As it was they just clinked and clattered and made far too much noise.

They weren't the only noise. Derek's ears may have felt like they were stuffed with cotton but even that couldn't block out the sound of sirens, blaring through the facility to alert anyone and everyone to the escaped specimen. It was hard to pick out the sound of raised voices and heavy footsteps underneath the shrieking of the alarm, but Derek strained until his head ached to keep track. He couldn't afford any less, not if he wanted to get out of here.

He needed to get out of here. They'd already killed his sister— _god, he had let them kill his little sister, how could he let it happen again, how could he_ —and he'd be damned if he stuck around long enough for them to do it to him too.

Derek stumbled around a corner, his balance failing him and nearly sending him tumbling to the ground. The footsteps were gaining on him, guards and orderlies getting closer every second, but he was too woozy to pinpoint what direction they were coming from. He gritted his teeth against the haze and shook his head, hard. He couldn't keep wandering in circles in this labyrinth of a facility; he would never make it out if he kept looking for a damn door. He would have to make his own.

After a deep breath, a sad attempt to steady himself, Derek pressed his ear flat to the nearest wall. He had been moving outward from the central holding area—at least, he was pretty sure he had—and all the doors and adjoining hallways led back the way he'd come. It stood to reason that this might be an exterior wall. If he listened hard enough, past the sirens and the footsteps and the thumping of his own overworked heart achingly loud in his ears, he could hear the buzz of streetlights and the whine of mag-trams flying past.

Freedom, right on the other side of the wall. There was just a few inches of solid concrete and tempered steel standing in his way.

Derek felt his eyes flare red and something in his chest _burned,_ accompanied by a faint clicking sound, but he didn't have time to worry about what that meant. The tramp of the security guards converging on his location with tasers in hand was loud enough to block out the alarms now and there was no time to do anything but pull back his arm and _swing._

 

 

* * *

 

 

The darkness of the city street was just as blinding as the stark brightness of the facility's upper hallways. A low fluorescent glow seeped up from the strip-lights embedded in every sidewalk, but that didn't stop Derek from fumbling along like a drunk.

The pain certainly didn't help either.

Derek cradled his hand to his chest, fighting against the growl that rumbled there; it wouldn't do him any good, and it would draw attention. The streets weren't exactly crowded, but these parts of the city were never truly empty and a werewolf could drive even the lowest of lowlives to reach out to the Enforcers they usually strove to avoid.

He had gotten out. He'd been right about the placement of the exterior wall, and in thinking that he could punch in his way through it. What he hadn't counted on was how much his healing had been compromised. He didn't know how much of the serum was still in his system now, but it rarely lasted more than a few hours. That was as strong as the researchers had managed to make it.

The crushed bones of his hand would start to heal eventually. They would be fine, he knew that. None of that did anything for the pain that made his head swim and his gut roil. He'd already been sick once, heaving up a thin string of bile that stung his throat and splattered against the rusted metal of the mag-tram tracks. It hadn't made him feel any better.

His chest still burned. It was a sharp pain right under his breastbone that radiated out until it was hard to breathe, though that might have been broken ribs from when he'd jumped off an overpass to lose the facility guards. It hadn't been a graceful landing even by human standards, much less for a werewolf, but he'd scrambled to his feet and run, chains sparking over the concrete, until his soles bled and he couldn't hear the men on his tail anymore.

Now there was no one behind him, no shouts, no _woom-woom_ of charging weapons, and Derek's strength was failing him. He'd been pushing himself on for too long and the waning adrenaline left him weak enough that his knees shook with every step he tried to take. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten anything; they'd been giving him nutrient injections in the facility, but there had been no way to mark the passage of time there so he had no idea how long ago his last infusion had been. Or how long it had been since he'd ripped his restraints from their moorings, raked his claws across two orderlies' throats, and punched his way out of the building.

He had no idea how long it had been since he had watched them wheel Cora away, strapped down as securely as the rest of them and convulsing hard enough that her elbows left dents in the metal beneath her.

Derek tripped over an uneven joinment in the sidewalk and hit the side of the building hard. The impact jostled his crushed hand, his broken ribs, and sent enough agony rushing through him to finally shake the growl loose in his throat. It took several minutes for Derek to get air back into his strangled lungs, and several more for him to fight back the memories of other times he had been in this much pain. There were no scalpels here, no white-hot lasers, no white coats leaning over him murmuring observations into their transcription devices as they cut into his flesh.

No, here there was just a dimly lit sidewalk, the criss-cross beams of overlapping mag-tram lines, the rusted metal of a half-built and abandoned high-rise. Just the thick fug of exhaust that hung in the air like a blanket of ash to block out the sun. Just a strung out shocker sprawled out in the nearest alleyway, mods charged up and blinking bright colors, still twitching faintly and already looking for his next plug-in.

Derek leaned against the wall, breathed as deeply as he could, and told himself that he was out. He was _out_ and he was alive and his healing would kick in any minute and he could disappear, could stay two steps ahead until the facility gave up on chasing him. Derek swallowed down another rush of bile and an even stronger surge of guilt and shame as he reassured himself that they didn't need him. They had plenty of other specimens, after all.

His chest still burned. He pushed his shirt—stolen off a clothesline a few streets back—up and out of the way with his unbroken hand, but there was no wound there. Well, there was the discoloration of severe bruising on his side from where he’d hit the ground hard enough to break bone, but no indication of what was causing that targeted pain higher up, just to the right of his heart beneath his sternum. He let the shirt fall again and nearly bit through his tongue to keep from screaming when the motion sent the chain still dangling from his wrist into his crushed hand.

That should be healing by now. All his injuries should, but his hand was still mangled and his breathing was getting more labored like maybe he had internal bleeding that wasn’t slowing down like it should. Or maybe that was his ribs pressing against his lungs, or something else entirely; Derek didn’t really have any idea how it all worked. He had never been in so much pain consistently for so long, not without the glare of fluorescent lights and the bright flare and burn of lasers and dispassionate voices murmuring overhead, and with tears clouding his vision it was hard to tell which pain was real and which was just a memory.

But he had to keep moving. There was nothing he could do about his injuries or the pain until he fully metabolized whatever was in his system and his healing kicked back in properly, but that would never happen if he got caught. The only thing for him to do was put more distance between him and that place, and hope for the best.

But his legs almost gave out as soon as he tried to start walking again. The shocker in the alleyway called out to him, words too slurred to understand. Derek ignored him; the guy was buzzed as hell and would never remember the encounter when his charge ran down anyway. He gritted his teeth, braced with his good hand, and began the slow and laborious process of forcing his battered body to move.

He only made it one more block before he heard it: a hard, metallic clanging. The ringing echo that everyone recognized—that everyone _feared._ Mag-boots on the tram tracks.

Enforcers.

The jolt of fear that ran through Derek was deeper and stronger than any normal adrenaline rush. He lurched forward on legs gone numb and shaky, good hand braced on the wall. The shocker was suddenly gone, scrambling further down the alley, away from the steady tromp. Derek was sure anyone and everyone else in the area was making a run for it too. No one wanted to be out and about when Enforcers came through, not unless they wanted to get taken in. There wasn’t a person on these streets who couldn’t be charged with something.

Most of them would get a few months of labor, or maybe they would just be stripped of their illegal mods and dumped back where they’d been found. A few would get a fine so hefty that incarceration would have been preferable. Derek, though—he would be sent back. He would be run down and snatched up and taken back to that place to be cut into again and again like he had been for the last however the fuck long it had been. As far as he was concerned, it was a fate worse than death.

Maybe Cora had been the lucky one in the end. He felt sick for just thinking it, but the thought was there nonetheless and it drove him on, lumbering down the empty road as fast as he could manage when it was far from steady beneath his feet.

Tall metal skeletons of abandoned construction projects on all sides made it hard to pinpoint where the footsteps were coming from. Everything echoed, everything rebounded and came back to beat against his eardrums. All Derek could do was make his best guess and stumble-run the other way.

In the end, that didn’t do him much good. Normally an alpha werewolf could out-run all but the most heavily modded individuals, those with industrial or military upgrades, but Derek wasn’t exactly in the best shape. He was malnourished and broken, he was exhausted and running on fumes, and Enforcers were the best of the best. They were the elite, the iron fist that kept the underlings in line.

They were inescapable.

A bolt slammed into the steel beam that was keeping Derek upright, sending electricity zinging through the conductive surface. It burned Derek’s hand and raced up his arm. He yanked himself back before the shock could do real damage, but it still made his teeth buzz and his heart skip alarmingly. Wide-eyed, he spun around for any hint of his attacker, but the dimness of the streetlights left far too many shadowed hiding places.

Before he could give running another try, there was the _shing_ of another bolt as it whizzed within an inch of his head. An explosive bolt, as it turned out, one that sent Derek to his knees with the concussive blast that slammed into his back and left a ringing in his ears that reminded him far too much of the facility’s alarms. No amount of head-shaking could rid him of that sound and getting to his feet again was difficult with one functional hand, but it was that or stay and be caught.

He could _not_ be caught.

And yet within ten seconds, Derek was being slammed back against a rough concrete wall. His ribs screamed in protest of the rough treatment, but the arm across his throat was much more concerning. It was cold and smooth under his fingers, solid enough that it didn’t crumple even the slightest bit beneath his grip. The face that leaned in close to his was half metal and half pale skin, dark hair cascading unevenly over one shoulder. The woman’s entire left eye glowed the bright, eerie green of a powerful x-ray mod.

Despite the pain in his ribs, the throb of his hand, the continued burn in his chest, Derek thrashed against the weight that pinned him down. The woman simply pressed harder against his throat with all the strength of hydraulic joints, her magnetic boots holding her immovably in place no matter how much he struggled to shove her back.

“Stop fighting,” the Enforcer said sharply.

Derek snapped at her, fangs dropped and eyes as red as hers was green. It didn’t do any good. No doubt, he was far from the only werewolf this Enforcer had ever been sent after. They were trained to track, fight, restrain, and kill his kind. There weren’t many like him left walking freely nowadays, and it was because of those like her and her employers. Derek could struggle all he wanted, but his chances of escape were practically nil.

That didn’t stop him. He dug his claws into the metal arm and pulled as hard as his overworked muscles would allow, a constant growl in his throat. The Enforcer held firm, not even watching him anymore. Her eyes—both the glowing green one and the human brown one—were turned away, scanning the alley from end to end before she turned back and repeated her command: “ _Stop fighting._ ”

“Why should I?” Derek snarled back. “I’m not letting you take me back there. I’ll die before I let you—”

“I’m not taking you back.”

Derek would’ve laughed outright at that if he had any air in his lungs to spare, but breathing was proving difficult for a number of reasons so he didn’t bother. He just growled again, bucking futilely against her hold. No doubt the facility wanted to get him back intact, but maybe if he fought hard enough, proved himself enough of a liability, then the Enforcer would have no choice but to put him down before that could happen. At least that way it would be over.

He bucked again and the Enforcer brought her free hand—her human hand—to his chest, pushing him more firmly against the wall at his back. The pressure to his ribs drew a strangled cry from his throat, and the _burn._ Right under her palm, that strange unnatural sensation. Her eyes dropped to that spot, her mechanical pupil narrowing to a pinpoint as she zoomed in her enhanced sight.

“Rem-dac,” she said. “Damn it.”

Derek didn’t know what that meant. He would’ve told her as much, but he didn’t really care. All he cared about was that he was getting weaker by the second and if he didn’t get her to kill him now then he would be too weak to resist any longer. He would end up back on the metal table with the lasers and the white coats and the voices, and that _couldn’t fucking happen._ He renewed his struggle, kicking and snapping and—

“ _Quiet!_ ”

The echo of her hiss was drowned out by more clanging; another pair of mag-boots. Another Enforcer. The one pinning Derek didn’t seemed pleased to have backup though. To the contrary, a harsh scowl pulled down the corner of her mouth and the mods along the right side of her scalp lit up red. Derek didn’t know what they did, but, again, he didn’t care.

The Enforcer’s arm left his throat, but before he could take advantage of the sudden relief, the metal hand was clamping over his mouth instead, effectively silencing him. There was no point in trying to dislodge it, no way to bite. He watched in furious helplessness as the Enforcer lifted her other hand to tap at the lit up comm-pad on her chest panel.

“ _A-2, mission status._ ”

“Sector three clear,” the Enforcer responded, eyes locked on Derek’s. “No sign of target 883. Moving on to sector four.”

“ _Acknowledged._ ”

The comm-pad went dark. Derek stared, struggles temporarily suspended, though his heart kept racing. The Enforcer stared back at him for a long few seconds and then, slowly and cautiously, removed her hand completely.

“Why—?” Derek asked hoarsely, unable to force out more coherent words.

“I’m not taking you back,” she said again.

“Why not?” Derek managed to say, but she was already talking over him, pushing in close to whisper barely loud enough for even his advanced hearing to pick up.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You need to find Lydia Martin. She can help you.”

“Who is—”

“She can help you,” she repeated. “Three blocks west, one level down, second building to the east. Knock four times and tell her Allison sent you. Tell her you have a rem-dac. She’ll know what to do from there.”

Derek swallowed hard, feeling dizzy and slow and like nothing made sense. “I don’t understand,” he said, but the Enforcer was already backing away from him. She lifted her metal hand in a gesture that was almost a wave, and then the fingers retracted with a mechanical whir and a crossbow apparatus slid smoothly into its place, already loaded with another bolt.

“Trust me,” she said simply. “Go in peace. I hope you make it.”

Past the alley mouth, the Enforcer set her mag-boots onto the mag-tram tracks. The magnets hummed as they engaged, and then she was moving, pulled along by the force and sent racing down the line to the next sector. Derek was left alone, staring after her with no idea what had just happened.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The second level had even less sunlight than the first. Not that the first was _bright,_ not by any stretch of the imagination, but the top level usually had at least a bit of exposure during the day. Below was one giant shadow, winding paths and squat buildings buried under the raised pavements and mag-trams of the streets on the surface. The only substantial illumination came from the streetlights, long strips laid into the overlayer above to shine down whatever colored light had been on hand when the last one gave out.

The block the Enforcer had directed Derek to was lit with purple, a weak and flickering violet that did very little for visibility. Even with his natural night-vision it was hard to make out where one building ended and the next began. Derek had to wonder how anyone without modded eyesight could find their way down here. But then again, there was hardly a single person in the second level without some sort of mod—most of them illegally installed—and eyes were among the most common mods for people to get.

There was noise coming from the second building to the east, the loud thumping of shitty synth music and the constant hum of electricity underneath. The exterior was no different than any of the surrounding buildings, no signage or anything to indicate what type of establishment this might be, but Derek was willing to bet it was a shocker hub. He raised his hand to knock anyway; while he had no idea why an Enforcer would let him walk and send him to a place for lowlives to get high, he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, so he might as well take the chance.

He knocked four times, putting some of his werewolf strength behind the motion in hopes that the sound could be heard over all the music. A few seconds passed without response. He was about to knock again when a thin slice of the door retracted, just enough for a pair of dark, slanted eyes to peer out at him. There was a thick ring of gold around the pupils: thermal scan mods.

“Who’s your referral?” the woman asked.

Derek swallowed, hoping he wasn’t going to get himself killed with this; name-dropping an Enforcer on the second level didn’t feel like the safest bet. Still, he said, “Allison sent me. She said to ask for Lydia.”

The woman’s eyes widened, mods whirring as she scanned him top to bottom. Whatever she was looking for, she must have been satisfied because the peephole slid closed and the door swung inward to admit him. She was average height, slim, muscular, and modded like crazy with what looked like mostly weapons. Despite how heavily armed she was, she smiled at him and politely didn’t mention his bare feet, the dangling chains he had thrown over his shoulder, or his plethora of injuries, though her gaze did linger on the crushed hand still cradled against his stomach.

“I’m Kira,” she said. “Come on, Lydia’s in the back. I’ll take you to her.”

Derek followed obediently, trailing along as she wended her way through the large room. It was crowded with people, all of them plugged in to the tall console pillars jutting up from the concrete floor at even intervals, dead to the world and twitching from the current. They didn’t seem at all aware of the loud music or the bright flashing lights. Not a one of them so much as looked up as they passed, not even when Derek tripped over an outflung leg, a mass of catatonic bodies and blank stares.

Derek was very glad to disappear through a curtain at the far end of the hub, emerging into a much smaller and darker back room. There was a torn up couch, a rickety desk, and a small red-haired woman counting her way through a stack of outdated paynotes, the kind that topside banks wouldn’t accept as real currency anymore but that worked just fine on second level.

The redhead glanced up as they came in, sharp green eyes ringed with stark white. Derek thought that was some sort of memory mod, a cranial hard-drive or internal backup, but he couldn’t be sure. She had a line of small metal plates that marched down the side of her throat too, which were even more unfamiliar and Derek couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what those were for.

This must be the Lydia he was looking for. The Lydia who was supposed to help him, whatever that meant.

“Who’s this?” Lydia asked. She didn’t pause in her counting, despite her gaze not being on her hands.

Kira put a hand on Derek’s shoulder and said, “Allison sent him.”

That got Lydia’s attention. She carefully laid down the paynotes in her hand and stood to look Derek over, circling around to view him from every angle. He had the feeling she was recording this, recording _him,_ for future review and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and a growl rumble through his chest.

“Werewolf then,” Lydia said primly as she came back around to face him. “From the facility?” she asked, eyeing the chains.

Derek didn’t need to confirm that; his involuntary flinch did that for him. Lydia nodded.

“Kira, get him something to eat,” she said abruptly. “I’ll call Braeden. She’ll have him on his way in an hour.”

Then Lydia was turning back to her paynotes, and Kira was heading for another curtained doorway opposite the one they’d come through, and Derek didn’t know what was happening. Everyone else seemed to know, but they didn’t seem to want to _slow down_ long enough to explain to _him_ what the fuck was going on or why he was here. Really, so far the Enforcer had made as much sense as anyone else, and she had barely said three sentences to him.

There was something else she had said—another thing that Derek didn’t understand, but that had sounded important at the time. Before Kira could disappear, Derek cleared his throat. He had her and Lydia’s eyes on him at once, part curious and part wary.

“She said—” He had to pause and think back through the pall of panic and confusion and disbelief to remember the unfamiliar term she had used. “She said to tell you that I have a rem-dac.”

The reaction to that statement was immediate and alarming. Kira took a step back, one hand falling instinctively to the hilt of what looked like a collapsible blade tucked into a compartment of her belt. Lydia stood up quickly enough to knock her chair over backwards and hissed, “ _Damn_ it,” just like Allison had.

“You have a functioning rem-dac?” Kira demanded, as if Derek would have the answer to that question. She said to Lydia, “We never get functioning rem-dacs.”

“Morrell always gets them to us clean,” Lydia said. “And Allison’s are free-range. It’s been years since we’ve had anyone in here loose.”

“What do we do about it?” Kira asked. “We can’t just—”

“We need a ‘path.”

Kira ran both hands through her hair, blowing out a long breath. “We don’t have one,” she said. “Not since Corey got brought in. We don’t have anyone else on the line that can shut down a rem-dac, do we?”

Lydia opened her mouth to respond, but Derek didn’t let her get that far. There was too much talking going on and not enough sense being made. His everything hurt, his head was spinning, and he wanted answers, goddamn it.

“Okay, stop,” Derek barked. “Just _stop._ ”

The women stopped, startled by his outburst. Lydia had the audacity to appear almost offended, but Kira at least had the good grace to look sheepish.

Derek had a lot of questions, but the most concerning by far was: “What the hell is a rem-dac?”

Kira and Lydia exchanged a loaded look that did absolutely nothing to reassure him. Lydia flipped her hair over her shoulder, settled that unsettling white gaze on him, and said, “It’s a colloquial abbreviation of ‘remote deactivation device’. Which is a polite euphemism for a device that a secondary party can use to terminate you at will and from any distance.”

Derek went cold all over. “Terminate me?”

“Kill you,” Lydia helpfully clarified. “There’s a killswitch in your chest and someone else’s finger is on the trigger. We need to deactivate it before the facility decides you’re not worth chasing anymore and opts to put you down instead.”

“Why can’t you just take it out?”

“You of all people should know how difficult it was to get in,” Lydia told him, one eyebrow raised.

But he didn’t. Derek had been cut into so many times, it was all just one giant blur of agony and chrome. He had no memory of the white coats leaving anything behind when they finally retreated enough to let his chest close up. What the hell had they done to him? What else could they have left inside him without him realizing? Suddenly he felt hot all over, skin crawling and claws itching to drop.

“The rem-dac is implanted so deeply in your chest that trying to cut it out ourselves would do a lot of damage,” Kira said. “For werewolves, an activated rem-dac suffuses the body with a mixture of wolfsbane and silver nitrate, which in small doses can impede healing. At higher doses, it’s lethal. Judging by your hand, the rem-dac is active but only in the initial stage.”

“Which means they’re still hoping to find you and bring you in,” Lydia said.

“There’s usually a failsafe in the design that prevents outside interference. In trying to remove the activated device,” Kira went on, “there’s every chance that it would release the rest of the poison into your system.”

“And kill you,” Lydia finished for her. “But there’s another way.”

“Not if we don’t have a ‘path,” Kira said, voice suddenly low like she thought that would keep Derek from hearing. “Which we don’t.”

Lydia hummed thoughtfully. The white rings of her memory mods glowed brighter, nearly eclipsing the rest of her eyes entirely as she reviewed whatever footage or data she had stored there. “We might,” she said.

“What?” Kira asked. “Who?”

“Stiles.”

Kira made a skeptical face. “The two-mod shocker? The one who’s been in here a few times?”

“He plugs in recreationally but never to a debilitating degree,” Lydia said. “And according to my observations, there’s a high probability that he can do what we need.” Mod lights dimming, she looked to Derek. “Follow me.”

“Where are we going?” Derek asked.

Lydia just gave him a tight smile and flipped her hair over her shoulder, turning sharply to push aside the curtain in the far doorway, obviously expecting him to fall in line whether she answered him or not. When Derek hesitated to do so, Kira stepped up to pull the curtain aside and hold it open for him. She said,”Don’t worry. We’re just going to see Danny.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Danny was a person, but only just. Anyone who was wired that deeply into the mainframe could barely be considered human.

The man sat enthroned in a padded chair with banks of screens and monitors and panels on every side, layers and layers of them all overlapping and flickering with video feeds or scrolling code. There were cables plugged into every port on every one of the mods that formed a patchwork across Danny’s chest, his arms, his skull. His eyes were wide and unseeing, a solid bright blue. Whatever he was seeing now, it wasn’t the room in front of him.

The room itself was directly beneath the shocker hub, accessible only by braving an unstable spiral staircase beneath a hidden trapdoor in the hub’s furthest backroom and then punching a 37 digit code into the gleaming chrome portal door at the base of it. It was as clean and high tech as the upstairs was dingy and basic. There was nothing else down here, just the man and his computers. And another code-locked portal door in the far corner.

Derek stayed by the first door, as far away as he could get from the wired up hacker whose unnatural stillness was disturbing to say the least. Lydia, on the other hand, had no such qualms. She stepped over cords and cables and wires until she was in what would’ve been the hacker’s line of sight if he hadn’t been so deeply embedded in cyberspace, hands on her hips.

“Danny,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing in there, pause it. We need to find someone and we need your help to do it.”

Derek had trouble believing that anything she said could reach Danny where he was. His doubt must have shown on his face because Kira leaned in to bump their shoulders together. It was probably meant as a gesture of reassurance, but it jostled every one of his numerous injuries and Derek was hardpressed not to give voice to exactly how much pain he was in. He bit his tongue though; he had screamed enough in his life to know how raw it left his throat, and he didn’t need to add that hurt to the list.

It took several seconds for the harsh blue light of Danny’s mods to dim to something almost resembling regular human eyes. Once they had, he spoke, his voice sounding strangely normal where Derek had sort of been expecting the synthetic tone of computerized speech.

“I’m busy, Lydia,” he said.

“You’re always busy,” she countered. “This is time sensitive.”

Danny’s sigh was a whirring of the fans that made up the cooling mechanisms in his chest. “What do you need?”

“Find me the location of this man.”

Lydia reached her hand into a jumbled mess of computer paraphernalia and dragged out a specific cord. She swept her long hair to the side, exposing a metal plate that spanned from the nape of her neck halfway up her skull, and swiftly plugged the cord into one of the many ports there. Her eyes flared white just as Danny’s flared blue to match. After a moment, she disconnected.

“Can you tell me where he is right now?” she asked.

Danny rattled off coordinates without a second of hesitation and Kira said, “I’ll tell Braeden to pick him up and bring him in.”

She disappeared the way they’d come in, the comm-pad on her shoulder open, and Derek was left alone with Danny and Lydia. The hacker had already dropped back into his stream, tuned out to anything in his immediate surroundings. So that left Lydia. She made her way through the labyrinth of cords once more and gave Derek another of those full up and down examinations that sort of made him want to curl in on himself and hide. Her pursed lips and narrowed eyes didn’t help.

“What?” he snapped.

“Stay here,” she said shortly.

Then she was gone too, back up the stairs without another word of explanation. If there had been anything at hand, Derek would’ve thrown something. Or he might have if his ribs didn’t throb in protest at the mere thought of exerting that much energy. Now that he was alone—well, relatively alone, considering Danny’s apparent disconnect from reality—Derek had a brief moment of dizzying, irrational fear. He felt like he should be _moving,_ should be _running._ Like standing still was a death sentence in and of itself.

But for the first time in what felt like days, no one was on his heels. He was in a sheltered place with people who claimed they wanted to help him instead of hurt him, and every cell in Derek’s body wanted to believe them because that would mean that it was okay to _stop,_ even if just for a few seconds.

A few seconds turned into a few minutes and before long, his legs were giving out beneath him. He collapsed against the wall to his back, sliding down to the floor. The metal was cold beneath him, but it almost felt good when he was so overheated. His vision swam, head pounding like a bass drum, ribs protesting every breath, and he had to wonder how humans survived at all. Having injuries last for weeks? For months? It had been a day at most and Derek was ready to cut his fucking hand _off_ rather than feel the bones grind agonizingly against each other for one more minute.

He lost track of time that way, too preoccupied with getting air into his lungs to try and count the minutes as they passed. He would claim to have dozed off, but he didn’t think the haze of constant pain he settled into could truly be deemed rest. When the portal door slid open beside him, Derek was too exhausted to startle. By the time he managed to pry his eyes open, Lydia was standing in front of him.

“Here,” she said, holding out a flask and a sandwich. “Slowly, though.”

Derek forced his muscles to engage so that he could take the offerings with his good hand. Luckily the flask wasn’t capped, so he didn’t have to struggle to open it one-handed. He brought it to his lips and had to fight hard against the urge to guzzle the cool water down all in one go. He’d had no idea how fucking thirsty he was, but the slide of the liquid down his dry throat was almost enough to make all the suffering worth it.

The first few bites of the sandwich were fine, were good, were _amazing._ But as they settled, Derek had to remember that it had been a long time—and he honestly didn’t know how long it had been—since he’d last had any solid food. Evidently he’d been on nutrient injections long enough for his stomach to shrink because a few bites was all he could manage before they threatened to come back up.

Lydia took the rest of the sandwich back from him without comment, and the flask too. Derek didn’t see what she did with them, too busy swallowing against the nausea and fighting down the sudden fear that he would never be right again, that the facility had broken him in ways he couldn’t even understand.

His chest still burned.

A touch on his arm startled him, had him jerking away on instinct. Lydia pulled back, hand raised in surrender, and said, “I just thought you’d want to get these off.”

The chains, she meant. The ones that had held him down very effectively until one loose screw in the mooring had given him the leverage he’d needed to rip them out of the floor. The links were heavy across his shoulder and the skin of his wrists felt raw and sore despite the thick padding of the cuffs. When Lydia produced some kind of multitool, Derek turned his face away but let her take hold of his arm.

He’d thought that it would feel good to have them off, that he would feel free. But there was no immediate feeling of relief besides the literal weight off his shoulders. The cool air stung the abused skin of his newly exposed wrists and he couldn’t bring himself to look down and see the damage left there. He wondered if, with his healing suppressed for so long, they would scar.

As Lydia hauled the chains away to dispose of, he closed his eyes and it didn’t matter that they were gone. He could still feel them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The next time the mechanical whir of a portal door opening came, it was from across the room. Derek roused himself in time to see two people come staggering through. Well, one of them was staggering. The other had the first by the back of his shirt and was hauling him along despite his vigorous protests.

“Hey, where do you get off, anyway?” he was yelling. “For fuck’s sake, I thought we were past all the manhandling. Damn it, Brae, lemme go!”

She did and he ended up in a heap on the floor. Braeden, mods pale and lit up against her dark skin, simply crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Target acquired and delivered. Can I get back to more important things now?”

“Oh, fuck you too, Brae,” the guy muttered from his place at her feet. He seemed to be having trouble sorting out where his long limbs were supposed to go. Even exhausted and with one hand out of commission, Derek managed to lever himself to his feet with more grace.

“Yes, thank you, Braeden,” Lydia said. “This will be reflected in your next payment.”

“Plus a bonus for it being so last minute,” Braeden added.

“Fine,” Lydia bit out. “Your service is much appreciated.”

With a not-quite-mocking tip of her head, Braeden swept out the portal door without a glance back. The guy she’d dragged in with her managed to get his feet under him at last and stood, rounding on Lydia with a scowl on his pale, metal-free face. The only mod that Derek could see on him was a simple cranial uplink with one input at the base of his skull. His eyes were a plain human brown, no upgrade to be found.

“What the hell is this, huh?” he demanded, one hand flying through the air and the other tugging at his rumpled shirt in a futile attempt to straighten it. “You running so short on customers you gotta start kidnapping ‘em now? I thought this was a respectable business, but I guess I was wrong. I’m disappointed, really, I am. I think I’ll take my business elsewhere from now on, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re not here to plug in,” Lydia said. “You’re here because I believe that you possess skills and abilities that could prove valuable to me.”

He laughed, harsh and abrupt and entirely unamused. “Me? No. I don’t have any skills.”

“Really?” Lydia asked, unconvinced. “Because I was under the impression that you were the one who fixed Braeden’s plasma-shot mod after her last run in with Enforcers. It was practically smashed to pieces, but you had it back in working order in a few hours. I call that skill. Exceptional skill, actually.”

The guy licked his lips, rocking back on his heels. “Okay, fine,” he said cagily. “So maybe I do a few repairs sometimes. What of it?”

“I think you do more than that,” Lydia pushed on. “I think you’re capable of far more than you want to admit to.”

“Look, lady, you don’t know me,” the guy snapped.

“Oh, but I do,” Lydia said, undeterred. “You’re Stiles Stilinski.”

A harsh beeping sound from Danny’s main console made all of them jump. In a flat, blank tone, Danny repeated: “Stiles Stilinski. Age nineteen.”

“What the fuck,” Stiles breathed, brown eyes going wide as he finally took in the sight before him, the monitors and the wires and the man swaddled in the middle of it all.

Derek had to second that question. Danny had seemed almost normal when he’d talked to Lydia earlier, but now with his eyes full blue again and his fingers twitching against his knees like he was manipulating a nav-pad in his mind, it seemed like he was so deep in the mainframe that the simple statement of a proper name had been automatically interpreted as a search string, a request for more data.

“Parents, Claudia and John,” Danny intoned. “Mother: Claudia Stilinski, formerly Claudia Wieczorek. Deceased—”

“Make him stop,” Stiles said. His face had gone grey and hands had balled into fists at his side.

“—age twenty-eight. Father, John Stilinski. Deceased, age thirty-seven.”

“I said, make him _stop,_ ” Stiles repeated, shaking, though it was hard to tell if that was from some strange fear or from anger. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, and a bit like an animal backed into a corner. He looked like Derek had felt as the facility guards had closed in around him, right before he’d destroyed his own hand to get away from them.

“No siblings. No extant relatives.” Danny went on, relentless, either unaware or uncaring of Stiles’ growing distress. “Orphaned, age fourteen. Designation: human, target 624. Warrant issued on 12-04-68 for the crime of—”

“Goddamn it, turn him the fuck _off_ before I pull his fucking plug,” Stiles snarled. He reached for the thickest cable in the pile. Derek didn’t know what would happen if that cable was yanked out, but Lydia lunged toward him with a desperate-sounding noise of protest so it couldn’t be good.

Derek got there first, werewolf speed pushing him forward just in time to catch Stiles’ thin wrist in his good hand before he could reach his goal. Stiles fought against his hold, glaring at him fiercely enough to make Derek very glad that Stiles had no weapon mods.

“I know what you are,” Lydia called out.

“Like hell you do,” Stiles bit out. Then, to Derek: “Let go of me.”

Derek tightened his grip; he was starting to think he knew where this conversation was going, what Lydia had been talking about with Kira earlier, why she had had Stiles brought here. Why Stiles had a warrant out for his arrest. Why Stiles would be able to help Derek with the device in his chest. It was all the same reason.

“I’m not looking to turn you in, Stiles,” Lydia said. “The Enforcers aren’t exactly my biggest fans either.”

“Then why am I here?” Stiles asked, still tugging uselessly against Derek’s hold.

“Because we need your help,” Lydia told him. “We need a technopath.”

This time when Stiles pulled back, Derek let him go. He staggered and almost ended up on the floor again. His breath was coming hard and it looked like pure instinct for him to stare wildly around the room in a desperate bid to make sure no one had overheard—the same instinct that had Derek running at the first clang of the Enforcers’ mag-boots. Stiles shook his head, a completely ineffective denial.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not. I’m not a— I barely even have any mods, how could you think I was—”

“I’ve reviewed the memory data of every interaction we’ve had in the last three years,” Lydia told him, tapping at her temple as her eye mods flashed white. “You’re clever and you’re good at hiding, but my calculations indicate a 86% certainty that you are a technopath.”

“Which means,” Derek said, “that you’re the only one who can help me.” The only one who could save his life, could get the rem-dac out of his chest, could undo what the facility had done to him.

Stiles rounded on him, spitting out, “And who the hell are you anyway?”

Lydia turned to look at him as well, mods alight, and Derek realized for the first time that no one had stopped to ask him that so far.

“Derek,” he said. “I’m Derek Hale.”

Danny’s console beeped and Derek’s heart plummeted into his gut as he realized his mistake, a cold wash of dread running through him.

“Derek Hale. Age twenty-three,” Danny said. “Parents: Talia and Robert. Mother: Talia Hale. Deceased, age thirty-six. Father: Robert Hale, formerly Robert Cavallero—”

No, no, no. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to hear it all listed out, the bullet points of his life and the family he’d lost on a cold blue screen. He shook his head. He tried to back away, but his bare feet were still slick with blood from his mad dash through the city and he slipped and stumbled. Danny didn’t stop.

“—Deceased, age thirty-eight.” he said, “Uncle: Peter Hale. Deceased, age thirty-one. Sister: Laura Hale. Deceased—”

Derek whined high in his throat. He couldn’t cover both his ears with one hand damaged, couldn’t block out the words. He tried to press his right ear to his shoulder instead, but it wasn’t enough. He felt lightheaded, dizzy and hot all over, and his fangs were pressing through his gums in response to the threat, but there was nothing for him to bite. There was no way to fight against the words that were coming next.

“—age twenty-four. Brother: Aaron Hale. Deceased, age twenty. Sister—”

Derek whined again, louder, trying to drown it out. His eyes burned red behind his eyelids and phantom chains were heavy around his wrists, the sound of gurney wheels and wet, gasping breaths ringing in his ears as she was taken away from him and he couldn’t do anything to stop it, just like the last time.

“—Cora Hale, age eighteen. Extant. Status: lost.”

All the noise stopped, replaced by a blank buzzing like static that wiped all thought from Derek’s mind.

_Extant._

No, Cora was dead. She was dead, Derek had watched the orderly take her away as she seized and choked and thrashed, remarking with cool disappointment about what a shame it was to lose another strong specimen and that they would have to rethink the dosage again. The specimens that left like that never came back, none of them ever had. Not even Laura.

But Danny had said. It was wrong, but he had to have gotten that information from somewhere, didn’t he? Something in the mainframe was telling him that Cora was alive. _Status: lost._ Derek didn’t know what that meant, but it wasn’t dead and that was all that mattered. If Danny’s intel was correct, then Derek’s sister was out there somewhere.

Danny was still going, droning on in that same plugged-in monotone: “Orphaned, age sixteen. Designation: werewolf, specimen 091, target 883.”

“Go back,” Derek said, barely hearing any of it. “Cora, you said she was—”

Danny didn’t respond, still rattling off his stats. “Collected on 08-12-71, escaped on 05-30-72. Warrant issued on—”

“Wait, go back, _please,_ ” Derek begged. He had to know if his little sister was alive. If there was even a slim chance, then he had to know. He had to find her.

Lydia was talking now too, her voice shrill and demanding, but Danny was still going and Stiles was yelling something and Derek’s blood was rushing so loud in his ears it blocked out everything else. Derek needed to know, needed to make Danny rewind whatever he was seeing and tell him more, but Danny wasn’t listening to him. Derek reached out, over the consoles and past the monitors, and took hold of Danny’s metal-plated shoulder with a claw-tipped hand—

The pain hit before Derek’s ears could even register the piercing shriek. It was almost too high-pitched to hear at all, but that didn’t stop it from driving into his skull like plasma-shots. Stiles had his hands clamped over his ears, scrambling to put distance between him and the source of the scream—Lydia, sonic emitter mods along her throat flashing purple—but Derek was on his knees in the space of one heartbeat to the next, Danny forgotten entirely in the face of the soundwave.

He hit the ground hard and immediately curled in on himself, waiting for the zap of a high-powered taser or the prick of a needle in his spine. The sonic emitters were a last resort for out of control specimens, to keep them down until they could be subdued properly, so it was only a matter of time before the guards were there to wrap him back up in chains and strap him down and run the current through him to stop him from shifting, and the shriek just went on and on and he couldn’t see, couldn’t _breathe,_ and he was never getting out of here, _never,_ and—

Derek’s last thought before darkness overtook him was that Cora really had been the lucky one.


	2. Chapter 2

Derek woke slowly, like rising up through a fug of exhaust into the dim light of midday topside. His mind was sluggish and empty, thoughts flitting through and slipping away before he could grasp them, and there was a low throb that made him sure that trying to open his eyes would be a bad idea.

His head wasn't the only thing that hurt. He felt like one giant bruise, like he'd spent hours on the table with the lasers and the scalpels and hadn't had time to heal up yet. But the pain in his side, in his hand, in his throat, was sharper than the generalized ache of half-healed surgical incisions. No matter how groggy he was, he knew the difference between one pain and the other.

He wasn't in the facility. He had escaped from that place and run through the city, he had been caught and released and sent on his way, he had found people who gave him food and cut off his chains. He was alive and _out of that place._ He told himself that once, twice, three times, repeating the mantra over and over again until his head was less fuzzy and he could stomach the thought of moving his limbs.

That was a mistake. When he tried to lift his arm, he met with resistance, a heavy weight dragging his hand back down and he was struck with the abrupt and absolute certainty that he had imagined the whole thing, that the escape and everything that had followed had been a vivid fever dream and he was still strapped down on the gleaming metal table in the white room, surrounded by dozens of other specimens just like him, helpless and waiting for another orderly to come by and wheel him back to the white coats and—

Derek lashed out, thrashing and snarling in blind desperation, looking to tear the chains out of the floor like he'd thought he had already done. But all he found was fabric, twisting around his legs and tangling him up. He fought against that too, against the feeling of being trapped, until a sharp voice brought him up short.

"Hey! Whoa there, wolf-boy," the voice said. "That's my bed you're destroying, and I'd really rather you didn't."

No orderly would talk like that. A guard would've shocked him into submission by now. The surface Derek was lying on wasn't the cold hardness of a metal slab, but soft and yielding. The restraining fabric—a blanket—fell away easily with a kick. The room around him, when Derek finally managed to force his stinging eyes open, wasn't the bright white and matte chrome he had been expecting, but rather full of warm browns and reds.

A dark-skinned, mod-covered woman leaned in the open doorway across from him, arms crossed and a scowl on her face: Braeden.

He hadn't imagined her. And if he hadn’t imagined her, then he hadn’t imagined anything else either. It had all happened, everything he thought he remembered. He was really out.

Derek's breath shuddered in his chest and he collapsed back onto the bed; Braeden's bed, apparently.

"Sorry," he panted. "Sorry, I didn't— What am I doing here? What happened?"

"You freaked and passed out," Braeden said bluntly. "Lydia didn't have anywhere to put you at the hub, so she availed me of my services once again. Apparently I'm running a hotel now."

"I'm sorry," Derek repeated. He dragged himself up to sit on the edge of the bed. When he put his feet down, he saw that they were wrapped in bandages. His hand too, a thick cocoon of clean white fabric encasing the entire thing. That was what had weighed him down and reminded him of all the things he didn’t want to remember.

"Where is Lydia?" Derek asked. "And the technopath. Stiles?"

"How should I know?" Braeden asked, one eyebrow raised. "I'm not their keeper. I'm being paid to look after _you._ "

"You don't need to look after me," Derek said, unaccountably stung by the implication that he needed to be taken care of. He had escaped from a high-level government research facility all on his own; he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

And yet when he tried to push himself to his feet, he swayed alarmingly and would likely have fallen if Braeden hadn't caught him by the shoulders.

"Alright, sit your ass down before you break yourself," she said, pushing him back down. "Lydia won't pay me if you end up dead on my watch." Between one blink and the next, it seemed like, Braeden was in front of him with a flask of water in hand. "Now drink."

Derek did, and the throb in his head started to recede almost at once. He wondered how long he'd been asleep; it had to have been several hours. Once he'd drained the flask, Braeden took it back. Without another word, she turned and headed for the door, apparently content to leave him here alone now that she was sure he wasn't going to keel over or destroy any more of her property.

"Wait," Derek called after her.

She turned back in the doorway, looking expectant but not exactly patient. Derek swallowed.

"Who are you?" he asked with little hope of getting an answer; no one had seemed inclined to give him any so far. "All of you. Why are you doing all this for me?"

Braeden let out a breath, something in her posture softening. She turned back to face him properly, leaning against the door frame again.

“It’s not just you,” she said. “You think you’re the only one to ever get out of a facility like that?” She shook her head. “There are plenty of people like you, Derek, and every one of them needs help. We just make sure they get where they need to go.”

“And where is that?” Derek asked, clamping down tight on the bubble of hope that was rising in his chest. Hope was dangerous, and he knew better than to take anything anyone said at face value.

Braeden shrugged. “That’s above my paygrade,” she said.

“Then how do you know it’s somewhere better?”

“What could possibly be worse than here?” Braeden countered, and Derek had to concede the point. He had been more than willing to die rather than go back to the facility. He would make that choice again in a heartbeat. If there was somewhere else, _anywhere_ else, that he could go where he would be safe from the Enforcers and the guards and the orderlies and the white coats, then it was a risk he would be willing to take.

Derek made another attempt to stand, this time managing to stay upright despite the twinge of pain in his cut up feet. That twinge was followed by a resurgence of the burning in his chest, the rem-dac kicking in to counteract his body’s attempt at healing. Derek rubbed at the spot, resisting the urge to dig his claws into his own chest and rip the thing out because it didn’t belong there, because it was _wrong_ and foreign and hostile—but that wasn’t the way. There was another way.

He looked up at Braeden. She was watching him, her face impassive.

“Stiles,” Derek said. “He’s a technopath.”

“Apparently,” Braeden said.

“You didn’t know?” Derek asked. He thought he remembered Lydia saying something about a broken mod of hers that Stiles had fixed, and that being evidence of what he was. “If he’s fixed your mods before, how didn’t you know?”

“He’s fixed plenty of my mods, yeah,” she said. “And he’s damn good at it. For the big ones though, he usually puts you down so you don’t feel anything. I guess it’s hard to notice anything strange or suspicious when you’re sedated.” She chuckled, a smile that looked almost fond on her face. “Can’t believe I didn’t realize. It isn’t the most subtle strategy.”

“Do you know him well?” Derek asked, curiosity welling up in him.

Braeden watched him for a few seconds, maybe debating whether or not to answer him at all. Then she said, “I’ve known Stiles for years. Ever since he saved my life.”

Derek’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Really? How’d he do that?”

“I used to be an Enforcer,” Braeden said boldly, head high and eyes flinty and unyielding. They didn’t seem to have any colored ring around the pupil to indicate a mod, but Derek knew better than to assume that meant there weren’t any. Not all mods were so obvious, and plenty could be hidden.

Derek waited for the flinch, for the inescapable urge to flee, but it didn’t come. Maybe it was the warm colors of the room and the soft blanket he’d woken up under, or the flask and the helping hand. Maybe it was just the way Braeden seemed to be challenging him, _daring_ him to react with fear, but he didn’t feel unsafe with her, no matter how much his rational mind insisted that he had reason to.

When she didn’t get a reaction, Braeden seemed to relax almost imperceptibly, some small measure of tension leaking out of her posture. A hint of a smile tugged at the very corner of her mouth, though she didn’t let it grow past that.

“I disobeyed orders,” she said. “I was given a target and a directive to kill them. I didn’t think it was warranted, and I made the mistake of voicing that opinion to my superior.” She looked away, somewhere over Derek’s shoulder. “Stiles found me half dead, integral mods smashed and half ripped out. I always thought it was a minor miracle he managed to put me back together, especially when he was practically a kid. I guess that makes a lot more sense now.”

“So,” Derek said. He stopped, swallowing through an uncooperatively dry throat. “So he’s good?” He honestly wasn’t sure what he meant by that, whether he was asking if Stiles was good at what he did or a good person. He supposed both were valid questions under the circumstances.

“Yeah,” Braeden said evenly, and something in the way she looked at him made Derek think she had heard both questions in his tone. “He’s good. A bit rough around the edges,” she allowed. “But good.”

She stepped back, freeing the doorway, and gestured behind her. “I’m not gonna hold you here,” she said. “The hub is that way. Either Lydia or Kira is usually there somewhere. Go up the stairs and around to the front, though, ‘cause I’m not giving you the portal door code.” She smiled, somewhere between mocking and teasing. “No offense, wolf-boy.”

“None taken,” Derek said with a huff of laughter. He brushed past her on the way through the door, and the touch of her hand on his shoulder didn’t make him flinch at all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Turned out, he didn’t need the portal door code. It was already open.

Derek had been intending to follow Braeden’s instructions, to come around the front of the hub and have Kira let him in again, but the back entrance to the hub’s sublevel was situated right at the base of the stairs leading up. He would’ve walked right past, probably wouldn’t even have noticed that the portal door wasn’t sealed shut, but he caught the muffled sound of a voice on the other side of it.

“C’mon, you really just gonna ignore me?” it said. It definitely wasn’t a feminine voice, so not Lydia or Kira, and it didn’t sound like Danny. That left—

The door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges and Derek stepped through to see Stiles standing directly in front of Danny, between him and the nearest monitor, with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.

“I know you can hear me, plug-head,” Stiles said. “Don’t pretend like you can’t. It’s rude.”

“Ruder than threatening to unplug someone?” Derek asked, and Stiles whipped around with a flail of surprise. Then he shoved his wayward hands in his pockets and cleared his throat, probably trying to pretend he hadn’t been caught off guard in an attempt to regain some of his dignity.

“I suppose not,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s refusing to acknowledge my existence now.”

“Can’t say I blame him.”

Stiles pulled a face and turned his attention back to Danny. “Can’t we let bygones be bygones?” he asked gamely. “I mean, I didn’t _actually_ unplug you. Trust me, I could’ve, okay? I wouldn’t even have to physically do it either, and I am exercising a lot of respect for your personal autonomy here by not just hijacking your feed myself and—”

“I don’t think threats are going to convince him to talk to you,” Derek pointed out.

Sure enough, Danny’s eyes were still stubbornly blue and there wasn’t even a flicker of acknowledgement that Stiles was there. Stiles huffed in irritation and ducked out of the circle of consoles.

“What are you trying to get him to do anyway?” Derek asked.

Stiles raked his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing up in lopsided spikes. He chewed on his tongue for a moment, eyeing Derek suspiciously. Apparently he decided that what Derek already knew about him was damning enough that anything past that wouldn’t do any _more_ damage.

“I want him to erase all incriminating footage of me from the net,” Stiles said. “I’ve worked damn hard to keep anyone from knowing what I am, and this jackass hacker just pulls it out of nowhere in a nanosecond and announces it to the whole room.”

Derek raised an eyebrow at him. “Clearly you haven’t been _that_ careful if you’ve got a warrant out on you,” he pointed out.

“Fuck you, fur-face,” Stiles snapped. “I was a kid back then. I got away from every Enforcer they sent after me, and I’ve been under their radar for five years since. Like hell I’m gonna let this guy ruin that by blabbing all over the place. Wherever he got that intel from, I want it wiped.”

“Then why don’t you just wipe it yourself?” Derek asked with a roll of his eyes. “You’re a technopath. Isn’t that the kind of thing you do?”

Stiles shushed him, flapping a hand at him and looking around the room as if there were anyone in there but them and a stubbornly silent Danny.

“God, you wanna say that a little louder?” he said. “And no, for your information, that is _not_ the kind of thing technopaths do. We work with the actual physical tech, not immaterial data streams. I can fry mods and rebuild them, sure, but I can’t do _shit_ about some data file tucked away in an obscure server in the depths of cyberspace.

“And that,” Stiles added, raising his voice and directing it over his shoulder toward Danny once more, “is why I need this fucker to _cooperate_ with me, damn it.”

There was a sizzling noise and a console port directly beside Stiles let out a shower of sparks. Stiles cursed wildly and danced out of the way, shaking his leg to keep any of the sparks from setting his pant leg on fire. The motion sent him crashing into Derek’s right side—the side with the crushed hand.

Derek cried out, hunching protectively over his hand as the dulled pain flared up to an inferno. He vaguely heard Stiles babbling out an apology, but it was a few agonizing seconds before he could unclench his jaw enough to respond.

“It’s fine,” he gritted out. “I’m fine.”

Stiles was halfway across the room, as far away as he could get in the confined space without getting close enough to ports for Danny to shock him again, and eyeing Derek with an unreasonable amount of wariness.

“What?” Derek snapped at him.

Stiles held up his hands in surrender. “Nothing, man,” he said. “Just waiting to see if you keel over again like you did yesterday.”

Derek snarled, flashing sharp teeth at him, and Stiles backed up another step. Then he paused, eyebrows pulling down over narrowed eyes.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be a werewolf? Why are you still all battered? Most werewolves heal from that stuff pretty fast.”

“Most werewolves don’t have an active rem-dac in their chest,” Derek shot back.

All the color drained out of Stiles’ already pale face and his hands fell limp at his sides. “Rem-dac?” He blew out a long breath. “Fuck, man, that’s—”

“It’s why you’re here at all,” Derek told him, frowning. “Did no one tell you that?”

“They’ve been a little busy,” Stiles said, a hint of bitterness in his tone that Derek recognized, that frustration of being left in the dark. “They said they needed my help, yeah, but they never said anything about a rem-dac. That’s some hardcore shit.”

“Trust me, I’m aware,” Derek muttered. He rubbed at the burning spot, pressing the heel of his palm just under his collarbone. Stiles followed the motion with his eyes and Derek could see the way his throat worked around a hard swallow. “Can you do it or not?” he asked.

“Do what?” Stiles asked, suddenly alarmed. The alarm didn’t go away at the disbelieving look Derek gave him. “What, you want me to fuck with it while it’s still _in you?_ ” he yelped, arms flailing. “Are you outta your damn mind?”

“No, I thought I’d just wait around until whoever’s controlling it decides to kill me,” Derek said caustically. “Of _course_ that’s what we want. That’s why I need a ‘path!” He pressed harder against his chest. He felt like maybe, if he pushed hard enough, he would be able to feel it under his fingers, the lump of metal and plastic and chemicals invading his body and holding him hostage. “We can’t get the thing out without killing me. You’re the only option here that gets me out of this alive. Now can you do it or not?”

Stiles’ mouth hung open. He tried twice to say something, but the words never made their way out. He scrubbed both hands through his messy hair, twining the fingers together behind his neck and letting them rest there. His eyes never left that spot on Derek’s chest.

“I-I don’t know, man,” he said eventually. “If I can’t _see_ it—”

“Technopaths don’t have to be able to see things to manipulate them,” Derek said. “You can just make machines do whatever you want them to. That’s what technopathy _is._ ” And why the government considered them such a threat, why they were hunted down with as much prejudice as werewolves were.

“Fuck you, man, we still need to know what we’re working with!” Stiles said. “We still need to have some idea or - or _understanding_ of the machine in question. We don’t just wave our hands and hope for the best.”

He gesticulated in frustration, making sharp shapes in the air in front of him.

“Everything I do as a ‘path, I could do with a fucking screwdriver, okay?” he hissed. “Because I know how these mods work and I know what parts need moving and how they interact with everything around them. I don’t necessarily need to _see_ the parts as I do it, but I still need to know that they’re _there_ and where exactly they are. You don’t just go in totally blind!”

Derek was pretty sure he was shaking, and he couldn’t tell if the pounding of his heart was from fear or anger. He wasn’t sure there was any difference for him at this point. Beyond that, why did he even care? Less than a day ago, he had been more than willing to die if necessary, had even fought tooth and nail to make it happen faster if that would keep him out of the facility, but now the thought of it had his stomach tied up in a lead knot.

_Extant. Status: lost._

That was what had changed. Before, it had been just him, running for the sake of running. Before, Cora had been dead, he had _known_ that she was dead. He didn’t know that for sure anymore. And he couldn’t roll over and die until he knew, not if there was a chance. Which meant that he needed Stiles to do this, to at least make a fucking attempt.

“If you can’t do it _,_ ” Derek said, voice hard and unforgiving. “If you won’t even _try?_ Then I’m dead no matter what.”

That pulled Stiles up short. He looked away, jaw clenching and shoulders tight. He was jittery, hands going through several aborted gestures before they tangled together again, and he kept licking his lips like maybe his mouth had gone dry.

The fidgeting reminded Derek strongly of the way the limp bodies in the hub upstairs had twitched and jerked at random. Kira had called Stiles a “two-mod shocker” when Lydia had first mentioned him. Derek wondered if Stiles was itching for a plug-in right about now. He also wondered where Stiles’ other mod was, since the only one he could see was the cranial uplink.

“Maybe,” Stiles said slowly, pulling Derek’s attention away from his examination, “if I had the specs for the device. If I knew exactly which rem-dac model it was and had some time to study the schematics, then _maybe._ ”

The lead knot in Derek’s stomach loosened just a bit. “How do we get them?”

“I’d bet plug-head over there knows,” Stiles said with a wry twist to his lips, thumbing over his shoulder at Danny, “since he apparently knows everything. Hey, maybe he’ll respond to _you._ You haven’t threatened him lately, have you?”

Derek hadn’t, so he rolled his eyes but approached Danny anyway. He stepped his way carefully through the giant web of cables and cords—avoiding outlets where he could, just in case his brief association with Stiles had gotten him on Danny’s bad side after all—until he stood directly before Danny’s chair. The solid blue, unseeing eyes were unnerving. He cleared his throat.

“Danny?” he said, trying not to feel like he was talking at an inanimate machine, an empty shell of a person with no one home inside. The entire concept of wiring in like Danny did, of letting his consciousness detach from his body and go racing through cyberspace as a collection of electrical waves, had always baffled him. He half expected to get no response.

But Danny promptly responded, “Yes?” in a perfectly innocent tone that confirmed once and for all that he really had been deliberately giving Stiles the cold shoulder. Stiles huffed indignantly, but Danny just continued ignoring him.

“Would you be able to find me a record of my rem-dac installation?” Derek asked politely. “Or the specs for the model used, if possible? Please?”

Stiles snorted derisively over Derek’s show of manners, which was hardly fair. Derek had plenty of good manners. He just wasn’t going to bother wasting them on Stiles.

“Since you asked nicely,” Danny said, and with a flare of his eyes and a twitch of his fingers, the nearest screen lit up with a 3D schematic, a list of stats scrolling alongside it.

Immediately Stiles was shouldering Derek out of the way—much more gently this time, Derek noticed and appreciated—so that he could plant himself in front of the monitor. The light from the screen danced across his face in flickering color, painting his cheeks with red and blue and green and reflecting in his eyes until they looked almost modded. His lips moved minutely as he read and his fingers were already twitching like he could feel the device in his hands.

It was mostly just pretty pictures and nonsense words to Derek, but Stiles looked like he would be occupied for a while. That left Derek with nothing to do but wait. Unless—

Danny had gotten him the information he’d asked for in a second, and he hadn’t seemed to mind. He had done the same for Lydia the day before. It seemed like this was what he was here for, to answer questions that people needed answered. And Derek definitely had questions. Or more accurately, one very important question.

“Danny,” he said, pausing to clear his throat when even that much came out a bit strangled. “Earlier you said something. Something about my sister. You said that she’s alive.”

“Cora Hale, age eighteen,” Danny repeated. “Extant. Status: lost.”

Derek’s heart clenched and stuttered. “But how do you know that?” he asked. “I watched her die, just like I did Laura. And what does that mean, _lost?_ ”

“It means there is no record of the subject’s death, but no further evidence of life either,” Danny told him. “From 08-28-72 onward, Cora Hale has no continued presence in controlled cyberspace.”

“But you think she’s alive,” Derek pressed.

“All deaths within the city limits are recorded.”

Derek shook his head, trying and failing to make sense of this new information. He could still see the way her body had jerked and shook, the way foam had flecked her lips and her breath had caught and rattled and heaved in her chest. The same as it had been with Laura, who was registered as deceased.

“I watched them take her,” Derek reiterated, stuck on that image in his head. It was as crisp and clear as everything after it was a blur. “I watched the orderly take her away.”

“The orderly,” Danny said, fingers twitching against his knee. A screen to Derek’s left flickered and lit up. “Was it this woman?”

The picture that came up was some sort of official identification, from a medical license if the fine print could be trusted. It showed a pretty young black woman with very dark, almond eyes and black hair—long, straight hair that had fallen over her shoulder like a curtain, swinging forward with every other step to block Cora’s face from Derek’s view as she was wheeled away.

“Doctor Marin Morrell,” Danny said. “Age thirty-three. Licensed medical practitioner, biochemist, and governmentally supplemented researcher. Also one of us.”

“One of you,” Derek repeated, feeling a little faint. “One of _you,_ like you and Lydia and Kira and Braeden? You mean, the people who get people like me wherever it is we need to go?”

“A carefully positioned operative, responsible for seventeen covert liberations to date,” Danny said. “Including: Cora Hale; Isaac Lahey; Brett Talbot; Hayden Romero; Vernon Boyd; Erica Reyes; Scott McCall; Meredith—”

There was a crashing noise, loud enough and close enough to startle Derek until his ribs ached. Stiles had tried to turn around too fast and gotten his feet caught in the wires. It took a few seconds of hard struggle to free himself and then he was at Derek’s side, staring at Danny, wide-eyed and frantic.

“Wait, wait, wait! Did you just say—” He cut himself off and set his sights on Derek instead. “Did he just say Scott McCall?”

“I think so,” Derek said warily. “Yes. Why? Do you kn—”

He was cut off by the mechanical hissing of the portal door. It slid open to admit Lydia and Kira, heads bent close together as they discussed. They both looked surprised to find the room already occupied; apparently they hadn’t counted on Stiles’ abilities circumventing the need for the 37 digit code, or at least they hadn’t counted on Stiles being nosy and invasive.

Lydia opened her mouth, ready to scold them for being where they weren’t supposed to be, but she didn’t get the chance because Stiles was already barrelling around Derek and straight toward her.

“Scott McCall,” he said, talking fast enough for his words to trip over themselves. “Would’ve been my age, about my height probably, curly brown hair, kind of a crooked jaw but not in a bad way? He might’ve been—”

“Whoa, Stiles, slow down!” Kira said. “What’re you talking about? What about this guy?”

“Did you get him out?” Stiles asked. “Did you get him out to wherever the hell it is you take all these people you ‘covertly liberate’?” He did finger quotes around the term, just short of mocking, and when no one answered him quickly enough, he repeated his question with more urgency: “Did you get him _out?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Lydia said.

Stiles made a noise of strangled frustration and pointed a furious finger at her. “How can you not know?” he demanded. “With those fucking memory mods of yours, you literally never forget fucking _anything!_ Danny just said that that doctor lady got to him, so did you get him out or didn’t you?”

“Not everyone she smuggles out comes down our line,” Kira said in as calm and placating a tone as she could manage.

“It’s a very decentralized organization by necessity,” Lydia added tightly; apparently she didn’t appreciate being accosted. “No one knows everyone that’s involved, and there are a number of exit points all around the city. Our line is only one of them and we only get a fraction of the traffic. So no, I don’t recall anyone by that name or matching that description.”

“But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get out,” Kira hurried to say. “It just means he wasn’t on our line. And we don’t have solid intel on any other lines. Okay?”

Stiles stared back and forth between them. He was practically radiating tension, shaking with it from head to toe, and Derek could hear the frenetic pounding of his heart from six feet away. Derek wondered if this was how he himself had looked when Cora’s name had first come up and he figured it couldn’t be too far off. He stayed quiet, waiting for Stiles to either give in or blow up, and he didn’t know which he thought more likely.

Finally, Stiles tore his gaze away from the women to look back over his shoulder. His eyes fell on Derek and stayed there, and Derek shivered; there was something sharp and discerning in those eyes—those completely average, human eyes—that rivaled Allison’s x-ray mod in making Derek feel uncomfortably exposed. When Stiles looked away again, Derek couldn’t help but slump a bit with a soft sigh of relief.

“You’re taking me with you,” Stiles declared.

“Absolutely not,” Lydia said sharply, no give at all in her tone. “There are protocols in place to follow here, Stiles, and the system is not set up to accommodate the protection and conveyance of _two_ targets simultaneously, much less when both of those two targets have high priority warrants out on them.”

“If you want me to shut down Derek’s rem-dac,” Stiles said, equally unyielding, “then you’re taking me with you.”

All three of the others stared at him. With some people it might’ve felt like a bluff, but not with Stiles. There was a hardness in his face that said very plainly that he had the audacity and the callousness necessary to leave Derek for dead if Lydia refused. A part of Derek wanted to be offended that his _life_ was being used as a bargaining chip here, but another part of him thought of Cora. If Scott was half as important to Stiles as Cora was to him, then Derek had no doubt that he could be just as ruthless to make sure he got his way.

“Fine,” Lydia said coldly. “You leave in six hours.” She turned on her heel, portal door sliding open at her command. As she made her way gracefully up the hazardous spiral staircase, she called back, “And I sure hope you can follow through on your end of the bargain.”

“I can,” Stiles said. “I will.”

It would’ve been much more convincing if his hands weren’t shaking, but he clenched them into fists to make them stop. He stayed stubbornly where he was as Kira reluctantly followed Lydia back upstairs. Then, without more than a passing glance in Derek’s direction, Stiles planted himself in front of the screen that showed the rem-dac specs, immersing himself in the complicated tech. He didn’t notice when Derek crossed to the opposite portal door, or if he did then he chose not to acknowledge him. Derek watched him for another moment before letting the door slide shut behind him with the hiss of a lock clicking into place.

He had six hours until they left. To go where, Derek didn’t know, but something told him it wouldn’t be the easiest journey, especially not with Stiles as a companion. He figured he might as well get as much sleep as he could while he still had the chance.


	3. Chapter 3

Morning came without much indication. On first level, there wasn’t so much a sunrise as a general lightening of the greyish skies, but it was at least something. Down here, enough of that diffuse light didn’t penetrate to make a difference. Only the beeping of an alarm roused Derek out of his sleep.

He woke easier this time than he had the last, possibly because he had forgone the blankets for fear of getting tangled and stuck and thrown back into that place in his head like he’d done earlier. He still hurt, but there was something to be said for real, natural sleep because his head was clearer than it had been so far. Aside from the pain, he felt almost normal, for whatever value of normal he could claim.

There was a sandwich and a flask on the bedside table along with a note, handwritten on a scrap of actual paper. It said that there were clothes, shoes, and a pack of supplies that were now his and to meet them in the backroom of the hub.

The items in question, when Derek glanced around for them, were in a pile by the door. After draining the flask and eating as much of the food as his stomach would allow, he set about changing into the new clothes. Not new in the literal sense, of course, but a decent quality for secondhand, and miles above the stolen shirt and thin, facility-issue pants Derek had been sporting.

Getting the clothes off and on, though, proved a damn sight harder than anticipated with his injuries and left him slumped against the wall, half-in and half-out of the new shirt and gasping for breath. Through it all, if he listened very closely, Derek could hear a faint clicking sound: the rem-dac kicking in to release more of the wolfsbane-and-silver-nitrate compound that was crippling him. It burned, and the marks didn’t heal when Derek dug the tips of his claws into the skin of his chest. As soon as he could stand to move again, Derek used his old shirt to wipe away the blood and tossed it aside.

All in all, it took him over half an hour to make it up to the hub like the note had instructed, but he did make it there, fully dressed and with the heavy pack held in his good hand because trying to shoulder it had made him feel like his ribs were breaking all over again.

The others were already gathered there, Lydia tapping her fingers against her desk impatiently, Kira watching the clock on her comm-pad with her bottom lip caught between her teeth, Braeden idly sharpening the gleaming machete apparatus that had replaced her left hand, and Stiles pacing.

Lydia was the first to see him and she offered him a smile that was somehow more of a rebuke than any verbal condemnation. “Derek,” she said with false brightness. “Nice of you to join us this morning.”

Stiles almost tripped over his own feet in his haste to turn around. “Finally! What took you so damn long? We were supposed to have left by now, you know. Do you wanna get outta this hellhole or don’t you?”

Derek scowled at him, letting the pack clunk down by his feet. Even that motion jostled his ribs and made his breath hitch against a groan. “I’m so sorry,” he grunted, “that my numerous broken bones interfere with my ability to stick to a schedule. Really, my deepest apologies to your timetable.”

Braeden snorted out a laugh. Her machete apparatus retracted, mechanical hand sliding back into place in its wake, and she looked up with a blithe smile on her face. “I like this one,” she said.

Stiles glared at her, a flush on his cheeks, and grumbled, “Shut up.” He did eye Derek up and down though, looking almost chastened.

Braeden stood and stretched. Now that Derek knew to listen for it, he could hear the nearly imperceptible whine of the hydraulic joints that were a holdover from her tenure as an Enforcer. It was damn near impossible for anyone to get those kinds of enhancements on the street, and amateur installations were usually more hazardous than they were worth. If Stiles had ever managed to repair one of those, it really was a miracle no one had pegged him as a ‘path before now.

“Well,” Braeden said to the group at large. “The timetable is actually mine, and I say we get going before our window closes. Everyone ready?”

She was answered with a round of nods. Only Lydia didn’t make a move to ready herself for departure and Derek assumed that she wouldn’t be coming with them on the next leg of the journey. She stayed seated at her desk, legs crossed daintily at the ankle, and watched them all impassively. It wasn’t until they were beginning to file out into the hub proper that she said, “Good luck, Derek. Go in peace. Oh, and Stiles?”

Stiles looked back over his shoulder, obviously braced for some sharp comment, which Derek didn’t think was entirely unwarranted considering their strained interaction so far. But after a few tense seconds, Lydia offered up the barest hint of a smile and tapped a finger against her temple.

“I’ve deleted all the pertinent files on you,” she said. “Not that it matters if we succeed in getting you out,” she added dryly, “but for what it’s worth, there’s no more incriminating footage of you in my databank. And I’ll see what I can do to convince Danny to do a more thorough purge. Just in case.”

Stiles’ defensiveness fell away, open surprise on his face. Then he smiled, practically emanating relief. “Thank you,” he said.

Lydia nodded and promptly turned back to her desk, retrieving a stack of paynotes from the electronic lockbox and beginning to count.

Stiles took the dismissal for what it was and led the way through the curtain and into the hub. Like the day before, it was full of shockers in various stages of charge, and none of them paid any mind to the strange troupe of people moving in their midst. The four of them wended their way through the console pillars to the front door, which Kira opened with a code that was thankfully much shorter than the one to the portal doors downstairs.

Braeden took the lead outside, Kira waiting for Derek and Stiles to pass so that she could take up a position at the rear. No sunlight filtered down around the raised street that made up the overlayer and the purple strip-lights were dim and unhelpful, but there weren’t that many obstacles anyway. The pavement wasn’t as cracked and broken here as it was in a lot of places, so picking their way down the block in Braeden’s wake wasn’t too difficult.

They kept their heads down and didn’t acknowledge any of the people that passed them by, and the passersby did just the same. Most of them had eye mods to light their way and a number of other mods besides, some of which Derek recognized and others he didn’t. Werewolves rarely ever got modded, considering all modifications were technically a surgical procedure and werewolves’ healing meant that any incisions generally healed up within minutes, which wasn’t enough time to allow for proper installation.

It also didn’t allow for anaesthesia or sedatives. Drugs like that were metabolized too quickly to be very effective, even at high doses, Derek knew from personal experience. The white coats had stopped bothering with them pretty quickly.

Braeden led them down several mostly empty blocks, past more derelict buildings and a few active storefronts, until they came to a place where the overlayer opened up to show grey sky. The metal ladder that led up to it wasn’t the same one that Derek had climbed the day before, but all the ones across the level were nearly identical anyway.

Derek let the others climb up first, though he had to wave Kira on with reassurances that he would be able to get up on his own. Once they were up, Derek braced himself for the pain he was about to experience and heaved his backpack upward. The throw needed a good amount of force to get the pack all the way up and through the hole, but he managed it and Kira helpfully caught hold of a strap to make sure it didn’t fall back through. Climbing up the ladder with one hand was easier said than done, but he’d successfully gotten down that way the day before and he could get up that way too.

He made it topside and had to sit down for a minute on the edge of the hole, an arm wrapped around his own torso to combat the throb of his damaged ribs and his head spinning. The others, even Stiles, tactfully didn’t comment. They just waited until he was back on his feet, at which point Braeden wordlessly led the way forward again.

Not too long later, she stopped at a crossroad, hand held up to signal the rest of them to halt as well. She leaned around the corner of a building, looking one way down the street and then another. She let her hand fall.

“Stay put,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

And without further explanation, she trotted out into the open alone. When she reached the mag-tram tracks, she reached down to fiddle with something on the side of her sturdy boots. They let out the same magnetic hum that the Enforcer’s mag-boots did, and locked onto the track in the same way, and within seconds Braeden had sped off down the line and out of sight.

“Don’t worry,” Kira said, apparently interpreting Derek’s surprise as concern. “She’s just doing reconnaissance. She’ll determine the route we take from here based on which sectors will give us the safest passage. It doesn’t take too long.” She patted him on the shoulder. “You and Stiles just sit tight, and I’m gonna do a quick walk-around, make sure the area’s clear of hostiles.”

Kira’s eye mods lit up, thermal scanning activated as she made her way down the street in the opposite direction from the mag-tram. Derek stayed where he was, still a little stuck on Braeden’s mode of transportation. He’d never seen mag-boots that he hadn’t heard coming from a mile away; the solid metal tread was _heavy_ and, as far as he knew, the actual magnet part wasn’t something that could be turned off and on like that.

Stiles sidled up alongside Derek, took one sidelong look at his face and where his gaze was directed, and made a much more astute guess than Kira had.

“Those are my design, you know,” he said, a tiny bit smug. “The mag-boots, I mean, Braeden’s mag-boots. Not exactly standard issue—no normal person wants to wear the actual standard issue mag-boots unless they want to give everyone in a ten mile radius a cardiac episode—but with my modifications, they’re so much better anyway. Lighter, quieter, _and_ faster on the tracks.”

“Impressive,” Derek said honestly. “You should start selling them. You’d make a killing.”

Stiles hummed noncommittally, hands in his pockets. When he didn’t follow it up with anything, Derek turned away from the tracks. Kira was nowhere in sight at the moment, Braeden was off on her own mission, and there was nothing to do but wait for now. Derek eyed the nearest building and considered the possibility of sitting down for a while, but no matter how tired he was or how much his still-bandaged feet were complaining, the prospect of folding himself down onto the ground and then dragging himself back up again later seemed like more work than it was worth.

He was thirsty too, and that he could do something about. There were flasks in all of their packs, he knew, so he hoisted his up. The motion put strain on his ribs, of course, like literally everything else he tried to do apparently. He tried to hold in his grunt of pain, but he wasn’t successful enough to keep Stiles from hearing.

“Your, uh...your injuries,” Stiles said, rocking back on his heels. “They’re really not healing at all?”

Derek held up his crushed hand, wrapped up to the point where it wasn’t even discernable as a hand anymore. “Does it look like they’re healing?”

Stiles bit his lip, then released it and let his tongue sweep out to wet it. Then, when it dawned on him that Derek was struggling to actually _do_ something, he darted forward to take the pack from him with a hurried, “Oh, here, let me!”

He helpfully held the pack open so that Derek could retrieve the flask and waited as patiently as seemed possible for him—which still included a lot of fidgeting—for him to drink from and replace it. He didn’t give the pack back to Derek either, but hugged it to his own chest instead. He was watching Derek, a strange look on his face that Derek wasn’t sure what to make of. Derek considered asking for his pack back, but honestly being rid of its weight for a while was a relief.

The two of them stood for a moment in what was, at least for Derek, a supremely awkward silence as they waited for one of the women to come back for them. Derek found himself holding onto his bandaged hand for lack of anything else to do, good thumb rubbing back and forth other the fabric lightly enough not to cause more than a twinge of pain underneath.

“I maybe could help with that.”

Stiles almost looked like he regretted saying that, or like he hadn’t meant to say it in the first place. He cringed, but he didn’t take it back.

“Help with what?” Derek asked.

“The healing thing,” Stiles said. “Or the _not_ healing thing, as the case may be.”

Derek frowned. “It’s the rem-dac stopping my healing,” he pointed out. “I thought you needed time to study the device before you could shut it down.”

“I do!” Stiles said quickly. “I’m not ready to, you know, do all _that,_ stop it from being remote detonated and whatnot. But I think I could maybe un-activate it now.”

Derek didn’t understand the distinction, and his confusion must have shown on his face. Stiles let out a sharp sigh, raising his eyes skyward in frustration, but he explained anyway.

“I mean ‘un-activate’ in the sense of ‘stop it from releasing the toxins that are impeding your healing’,” he said.

“And why can you do that but not shut down the whole thing?” Derek asked slowly.

“Look, rem-dacs are complicated, okay?” Stiles said, a little defensive. “They’re very complex and delicate pieces of tech and shutting them down without setting them off is _hard._ But,” he continued, “the intermediary diffusion mechanism is a lot simpler. Pretty much just a glorified on-off switch.”

An on-off switch responsible for every second of overwhelming pain that Derek had endured for the last day and a half. He still couldn’t take a full breath.

“Now, I’ve never seen a rem-dac of this model in person before,” Stiles went on, “but I’ve handled a few other models—outside the body—and according to the specs, the diffusion mechanism looks to be about the same here.” He shrugged as best he could with his arms wrapped around Derek’s backpack, a hesitant half-grin tugging at his lips. “So while I can’t shut it down just yet,” he said, “I think I can give you your healing back.”

If Derek were a less prideful person, he would have gotten down on his knees and kissed Stiles shoes out of sheer gratitude. Obviously, he didn’t actually do that, but he did say, with far more desperation than he intended: “ _Please._ ”

For a second, Stiles looked like he might balk, like he hadn’t expected that Derek would take him up on the offer—or maybe had hoped that he wouldn’t. Then he steeled himself, jawed clenched, and dropped both Derek’s pack and his own to the ground at his feet. He spent a moment rubbing his hands together vigorously, nodding to himself and staring a little disconcertingly at Derek’s chest.

Derek waited, unable to do anything else, but the longer Stiles took to get to the actual _doing_ part, the less certain Derek was that he wanted this. Not that he didn’t want his healing back—at this point, he was pretty sure he was willing to do a lot of unmentionable things to have his body pain-free and back in proper working order. What gave him pause was the method: Stiles using what amounted to magic to root around inside his chest. He had had enough people force their way inside of him already.

When it came right down to it, having Stiles reach in to him and mess around, even with ostensibly good intentions, was every bit as intrusive and wrong as when the white coats had put the device there to begin with. The thought of it had Derek’s heart racing and his breath coming faster, flashes of bright fluorescent lights behind his eyes and the phantom burn of lasers making his gums sting with the prick of fangs.

The press of Stiles’ hand against his chest startled him out of the memory. Derek jerked back from it reflexively and Stiles pulled back.

“Sorry!” he said. “Sorry, did that hurt?”

It hadn’t really, but Derek nodded anyway because that was just simpler. Because he didn’t think he could’ve found the words if he’d tried.

“Okay, well. If you want me to do this, you’re gonna have to stay still,” Stiles said. “Like, _really_ still. Can you do that?”

The rem-dac was clicking again, soft and persistent. The rush of chemicals felt like the kindling of a flame, small but scorching, burning him down from the inside.

Derek nodded again. He breathed through the instinct that told him to run, to hide, to curl in on himself and not let anyone close enough to hurt him, and made himself stand perfectly still as Stiles moved in close again. The contact still made him flinch, but he didn’t pull away this time when Stiles gently laid his hand along Derek’s sternum, palm wide and warm. For a moment there was nothing, just the two of them, motionless and silent. The rem-dac clicked on.

“Can you feel it?” Stiles asked, voice hushed. “The chemical release, I mean. Can you feel it?”

“Yes,” Derek told him, just as quiet.

Stiles didn’t take his eyes off of where his hand rested, right above the steady burn, but they weren’t focused. He didn’t seem to be seeing what was in front of him but looking past it, through it, to what was underneath. To the device hidden behind all the skin and bone and muscle, the myriad little pieces of metal and plastic that came together to make it work.

When Stiles let his eyes fall shut, Derek held his breath. He held it until he was light-headed, waiting for something to happen, for something to _change,_ for the feeling of something shifting inside him.

He didn’t feel anything, but he heard it the second the device stopped clicking.

Stiles’ eyes flew open again. He looked back and forth between his hand and Derek’s face at least a half dozen times before a sudden smile bloomed on his face, wide and bright and ecstatic. Derek was sure he was mirroring it, even if he wasn’t feeling any positive effects yet, even if the danger was far from gone.

A throat cleared, more than close enough to startle them both.

Kira was standing almost right behind Stiles, her arms crossed as she leaned in to peer over Stiles’ shoulder with eyebrows raised.

“Am I interrupting something?” she asked, eyeing the position they were in.

Stiles pulled back at once, nearly bumping into Kira in his haste to put distance between him and Derek. The hand that had been on Derek’s chest flew to his hair instead, running through and then gripping on and all around making a mess of it, though he didn’t seem to notice or care.

“What? No!” he said. “No, of course not! What could you possibly be interrupting? We weren’t doing anything, we were just—”

“Have you heard from Braeden?” Derek asked, cutting off whatever rambling nonsense was about to come out of Stiles’ mouth. It probably would’ve been twice as incriminating anyway, and Derek didn’t want to think about that, not when he could still feel the warmth of Stiles’ hand on him.

Kira smiled in a way that said she didn’t believe either one of them, which made Derek grit his teeth, but she didn’t comment further. She just said, “Yeah. She’s got a route for us and she’s on her way back. She should be here in a minute.”

“Awesome,” Stiles said.

He snatched up his backpack and slung it over one shoulder. Then he snatched up Derek’s backpack and slung it over the other. Derek frowned; that was a lot of weight to carry on an extended trek through the city, and Stiles wasn’t exactly buff. But when he reached out to take the pack, Stiles slapped his hand away.

Derek stared at him, indignant.

“You can have this back when you’re not broken anymore,” Stiles said staunchly. “Shouldn’t be too long.”

Derek wasn’t sure if he wanted to thank him for the assistance or hit him for making assumptions about what Derek could or could not tolerate and generally being obnoxious. In the end, though, he just rolled his eyes and let it happen.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t too long before Derek began to feel the effects of the rem-dacs deactivation, but it was long enough that Stiles had to pass off the extra backpack to Kira. Derek would’ve taken it back himself then, but Braeden was pushing them all to move faster and he wasn’t quite healed enough that the weight wouldn’t still slow him down.

He was healing though, that much was obvious. The soles of his feet didn’t sting with every step anymore and he was certain than when they finally stopped walking, he could peel off the bandages and find the skin there pink and new and unblemished. Breathing was coming easier now and with less resistance as the fractures in his ribs began to fuse. His muscles weren’t half as sore as they had been that morning.

His hand was another matter, but crush injuries like that always got worse before they got better. The bone fragments had to shift and move and make their way back to where they were supposed to be before they could heal, and _that_ was an agonizing process. But it was a different kind of pain, and a familiar one. Derek grit his teeth and waited for it to pass, knowing it would only take a few hours before he could actually use his hand again.

He could wiggle his fingers without debilitating pain by the time they stopped for a lunch break, three of them at a time sitting around on a curb as Kira and Braeden took turns keeping watch. The areas Braeden was leading them through were largely devoid of people, just a few people passing through in a hurry and the occasional shocker too buzzed to pay them any mind.

Still, as he chewed his way through most of a sandwich, Derek couldn’t help but look over his shoulder, straining his ears for any hint of incoming hostiles. Getting out of the facility and to the hub had been so difficult that the thought of just walking through the city without encountering any obstacles at all was laughable. Nothing was that easy, not for him, and waiting for the next disaster to strike had the back of his neck itching uncomfortably.

When they set off again, Derek could shoulder his own pack. He could breathe deeply—not always a pleasant endeavor in these parts, especially with a werewolf nose, but better than the alternative—and peeling back the bandages on his hand revealed fingers that were straight and finger-shaped, though still deeply bruised and tender. The others didn’t have to slow their pace to let Derek keep up anymore, for which his pride was immensely grateful.

In fact, it was Stiles who was lagging behind now. He wasn’t a werewolf like Derek, or modded for strength and mobility like the women. He was almost pure human, and not a particularly fit one at that, so as afternoon wore on he was beginning to reach the limit of his endurance. He wasn’t quiet about it either, only too happy to complain until Braeden reminded him that he’d literally coerced them into allowing him to come along. That mostly shut him up, though some minor grumbling did linger.

By the time the sky began darkening again and the high of having his healing back had mostly worn off, even Derek was getting tired and he couldn’t begrudge Stiles his complaints anymore. Despite how many hours they’d spent walking, the scenery had barely changed. One slum looked the same as another, even on first level—unless you ventured into the city center with its pristine mansions and glittering high-rises, and no common citizen was stupid enough to trespass there—and without the city wall in sight it was almost like they hadn’t made any forward progress at all.

There had only been one meal in each of their packs, so Derek had to assume that they were stopping for the night somewhere that had food. This assumption was proved correct when Braeden abruptly turned off the street they’d been following for the last hour and began leading the way through a series of tighter and tighter alleyways, around blind corners, even over a squat building by way of a pile of boxes stacked haphazardly against the back wall.

They finally came to a stop in front of one of a dozen other identically rundown buildings. Braeden knocked on the crooked door, four times with a pause after the third. Like at the hub, a slice of the door retracted to let someone peer out at them. This time, it was a dark-skinned man with brown eyes lit up with some orange mod. He didn’t say anything and neither did Braeden. Instead, she just stepped forward until her eyes were on a level with his. The man’s mods flared up bright, the light shooting forward in a horizontal beam to sweep its way up and down: a retinal scan.

Apparently satisfied that Braeden was who she appeared to be, the peephole slid shut and the door opened. The man behind it was young, possibly still a teenager, and he held the door open and waved urgently for them to get inside.

“Power down, Mason,” Braeden said as they all filed past him. “There’s no one tailing us. What kind of amateur do you think I am?”

“No kind of amateur,” Mason assured her as he shut the door. Unlike at the hub, he locked the door manually with a code almost as long as Danny’s portal door code. He turned around with a smile when he was finished and said, “Just better safe than sorry, right?”

Braeden rolled her eyes, but it was a fond sort of exasperation.

“No encounters,” Kira said. “No hostiles in the area as far as my scans detect, and Braeden hasn’t heard any chatter on the Enforcer frequency.”

Mason took that information with a sigh, shoulders slumping with relief. “We should be good until morning then,” he said. “So!” He clapped his hands together, expression brightening. “Who’s our lucky fugitive tonight?”

He leaned around Kira to see who she had brought with her, but he stopped when he saw that there were two of them. His bright smile faltered.

“Oh,” he said. “You, um— I thought there was only supposed to be—”

“Change of plans,” Braeden said flatly. “Extenuating circumstances.”

“Okay, well,” Mason said, rallying his good cheer, “I hope you two don’t mind sharing a room, because that’s all we’re set up for. Plenty of food to spare though!”

He was leading the way down the narrow hallway before either Derek or Stiles could voice a complaint about the arrangement. The two of them exchanged a look, but the smell of something hearty and delicious was wafting from the end of the hall and Derek’s stomach grumbled like he hadn’t eaten in years. Which, in a way, he hadn’t, at least not before the last two days. Arguing about the sleeping arrangements could wait.

Turned out the smell was coming from a thick meat stew, scooped out of a large pot still on the burner. Mason’s kitchen was a little small to fit five people, but they all squeezed in readily when the alternative was missing out on dinner. Derek ended up squished in between Braeden’s metal arm, the elbow of which was very pointy and painful when jabbed carelessly into his still-tender ribs, and Stiles. Truth be told, Stiles’ elbows weren’t much better.

Derek mostly kept his attention on his food while the others chatted. Kira, Braeden, and Mason all clearly knew each other well from being on the same line of this larger operation, and Stiles was a local who was at least familiar with the area and its population. Derek didn’t know any of the names they threw around or the past events they referenced, but he appreciated the excuse that provided to keep to himself.

He didn’t mind at first. For a pitstop in the middle of an illegal exodus, it was a strangely convivial atmosphere. There was definitely nothing about it that felt like it should be threatening. But after the first few minutes, the brush of Braeden’s shoulder against his and Stiles’ elbow bumping into his side started to make his skin crawl, and all the voices blended together into one loud drone that made his head ache. By the time Derek had finished his bowl of stew, he wanted nothing more than to retreat and find somewhere quiet to hide.

He set his bowl aside—having to duck Stiles’ arm, outflung for the sake of illustrating some anecdote or other—and edged toward the door. Mason caught sight of him before he could make his escape, and between being spotted and when Mason spoke, there was one brief second when Derek was gripped by fear, waiting for the screech of an alarm and the buzz of tasers.

They didn’t come, of course. Mason just said, “Oh, are you done? Your room is up the stairs and to the left. There’s a bathroom right across from it, if you want to shower.”

Derek hadn’t had a shower in a very long time. The facility had been more inclined toward hoses, restraints, and exorbitant doses of sedatives. That memory, stark and blurry at once as only drugs and pain could make it, had Derek hesitating halfway up the stairs, the bannister creaking under the force of his grip. But this wasn’t like that, he told himself firmly. This wasn’t the facility; it was just a regular bathroom in a random building on first level.

And the thought of hot water and clean skin, of scrubbing the lingering taint of the facility from his body, was desperately appealing.

Still, when he got up there, Derek had a feeling the only thing that prevented him from being thrown back to _there_ was that the water pressure was terrible. It was more of a drizzle than a spray, but it was warm and the bar soap still in its wrapper was almost scentless and something about the steady, simple sound of water against tile was soothing after the boisterousness of downstairs.

Derek got out of the shower feeling better than when he’d gotten in. For the first time in a long time, he was clean, he was healed, his stomach was full, and there was no burn of chemicals in his chest. He could almost say that he felt _good._

That feeling might have continued if Derek hadn’t crossed the hall to the room he’d been offered for the night, hoping that he might be able to manage a full restful night’s sleep, only to find the one bed pushed against the far wall already occupied.

Stiles was laid out there on his back with one arm held up above him, shirt sleeve pushed back to reveal a mod on his forearm. He was poking at the little screen there, the light of it illuminating his face in the dim room while he squinted at it, but he looked up when Derek came in. His eyes went wide, tracking up over Derek’s bare chest and down to the towel around his waist, and whatever he may have been planning to say was replaced with a noise like he’d swallowed his tongue.

Derek’s face went hot, which was just ridiculous. He had spent months, _years,_ being stripped down and examined and taken apart by dispassionate doctors and scientists while he could do nothing to fight it; there was no reason that having Stiles’ eyes on his bare skin should make him feel so exposed. The lights weren’t even on. Derek with his werewolf eyes could see just fine, but it was probably too dark for Stiles to see anything in detail.

All the same, Derek shook out the bundle from under his arm and started pulling his clothes back on, no matter how uncomfortable it was to slide back into dirty clothes just after finally getting clean.

“What are you doing in here?” he said sharply.

Stiles let his raised arm fall, the mod lights dimming as he pushed himself up on his elbows. “There’s only one room, remember?” he said. “Mason’s not equipped to house two at a time, but here the two of us are. So here I am.”

“And whose fault is that?” Derek asked, pausing to get his shirt over his head. It was an infinitely easier process than it had been that morning. “You’re the one who insisted on coming and wouldn’t take no for an answer. And that means—” He smiled, slow and self-satisfied. “—you’re the one sleeping on the floor.”

“What?” Stiles yelped. “No way!”

Derek didn’t wait for more arguments. He grabbed Stiles by an arm and a leg and hauled him bodily off the edge of the bed, dumping him unceremoniously onto the floor. He ignored Stiles’ squawk of protest, climbed over him, and happily took Stiles’ place on the bed. It was a decent size, relatively soft—though Derek had become very accustomed to metal exam tables, so it was possible that his perception was a little skewed—and he was quite content to make himself comfortable.

Stiles’ head popped into view over the edge of the bed at his elbow, hair rumpled and sticking up all over the place. The glare on his face was impressive, though it looked more disgruntled than anything.

“No fair,” he said.

“Yes fair,” Derek said. “The room was meant for me, and you’re the plus-one. You didn’t have to come along.”

“Yes, I did,” Stiles said, grumpy glare turning into something a little closer to angry. He leaned up on his knees and snagged the blanket folded up at the foot of the bed, dragging it down onto the floor with him.

“You could’ve waited for them to set up another run just for you,” Derek pointed out. “You’ve got your own warrant to escape, after all. You didn’t have to force your way into mine.” He reached down and groped around until he caught hold of a corner of the blanket, tugging at it, but Stiles held on.

“ _Yes,_ I _did,_ ” Stiles said again, tugging back harder. As if playing tug of war with a werewolf was a viable plan to get what he wanted. The set of his jaw was stubborn though, and so was his tone as he said: “That would’ve taken too long. Scott might be out there right _now,_ or he could be dead for all I know. I gotta get out there and find out, and I gotta do it now.”

Derek yanked the blanket out of Stiles’ grip, nearly pulling the smaller man over onto his face and too irritated to care. “Who is this Scott guy anyway?” he asked. “Why are you so desperate to find him?”

“Why are you so desperate to find Cora?” Stiles countered.

A growl ripped its way out of Derek’s throat, but Stiles didn’t flinch. “Cora’s my _sister._ ”

“And Scott’s my brother,” Stiles said, red-faced and insistent. “In every way that matters. So if all this gets me to him faster, then fine. I’ll sleep on the damn floor. I hope you get bed sores.”

Stiles flopped back down, out of sight over the edge of the bed, with a _humph._ Derek let him, opting to roll over to face the wall rather than find some way to respond to that. He wrapped the blanket around himself with petty relish, closed his eyes, and willed himself to fall asleep.

It might’ve worked if it had been quiet, but it wasn’t, not with Stiles fidgeting. The rustling of clothes as Stiles shifted positions every ten seconds or less was loud, though not as loud as the put-upon sighs. Derek gritted his teeth, determined to ignore them, but the sensitivity of werewolf hearing had its drawbacks sometimes. There was no blocking out the soundtrack of Stiles’ discomfort, especially when he was making no effort to hide it at all.

The door wasn’t fully closed, but the hallway outside wasn’t lit well enough to spill much illumination into the room, so it was obvious when Stiles activated his forearm mod. It was bright enough to get Derek’s attention even when he had his eyes closed and was facing the other way.

Derek rolled onto his back and said, “Really, Stiles? Do you have to do that?”

“What?” Stiles said plaintively. “It’s not like I’m gonna be able to get any sleep down here, so I might as well do something productive.”

Derek twisted around until he could get a good view of the small screen. “You call _that_ productive?” he asked, incredulous. “It’s a video game! You seriously got modded just so that you could have games embedded in your arm for whenever you’re bored?”

“And what’s wrong with that exactly?” Stiles asked. He waved his hand expansively, the motion sending the light bouncing all around the room in disorienting flashes. “Mods are supposed to make your life better, and my life is better when I’m not bored, so clearly this mod is doing its job. Besides,” he added, screen back in front of his face, “it’s not all games. This is a multipurpose processor, for which gaming is just one purpose. It has all my schematics on it too, for your information, and that is where the productivity comes in. So shut up and let me study those in peace if you know what’s good for you.”

Derek groaned and flung his own arm over his face. Even that wasn’t enough to block out the glow entirely, and there was still the fidgeting and the shifting and the rustling. There was no fucking way that Derek was going to get any sleep under these conditions, especially when a small part of Derek’s mind couldn’t help but remember the facility—dozens of specimens all stored in one large room, strapped down too tightly to struggle and too worn down to try, all the breaths and heartbeats melding together into a single drone.

The next time Stiles huffed out an aggrieved sigh, Derek flung the blanket off himself and said, “For fuck’s sake, just get up here.”

Stiles made a questioning noise, focused on the specs in front of him.

“Get in the bed, Stiles,” Derek said. “That’s the only way either one of us is getting any sleep tonight.”

The mod lit up Stiles’ slack-jawed look of surprise in dappled white and blue. “Wait, seriously?” he asked. “You want us to share the bed? The two of us both in it at the same time, that little bed there? Is that what you’re saying right n—”

“ _Get in the fucking bed._ ”

The light went out, leaving even Derek a little nightblind. By the time he blinked the afterimage away, Stiles was clambering onto the bed beside him, a long line of heat pressed against his side from shoulder to knee. There was a brief struggle over the blanket, but by now Derek was done with all the bickering and wanted nothing more than to fucking _sleep,_ so he let Stiles take it.

If Stiles was surprised by the easy capitulation, he didn’t show it. He just wrapped himself up tight with a noise of satisfaction and finally, blessedly, went still.

Derek rolled over to face the wall again, keeping his back to Stiles. It was a strange feeling, having someone so close to him, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. For the first few minutes he was painfully aware of the minute shifting behind him, of the rise and fall of Stiles’ breathing, slowing as he dropped into sleep. But after a while, the tension in Derek’s shoulders started to ebb, lulled by the steady thumping of Stiles’ heartbeat.

It didn’t take as long as he’d expected for him to fall asleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Derek woke gasping for breath with the flayed feeling of being cut open, the white-hot agony of instantly cauterized wounds, the harsh sting of cold air on tissues that weren’t meant to be exposed. Muttered voices were loud in his ears with strings of medical jargon he didn’t understand, pressing in around him, circling, swarming. He fought against his restraints, lashing out with all his strength to get out, to get away, to make it stop _hurting,_ but the voices didn’t stop and there were hands on him now, grabbing at him and holding him down, and he swung out again and again.

A sharp yelp cut through all the noise, louder than the rest and different somehow. It didn’t make sense, didn’t belong, didn’t sound like something a scientist would make. It sounded like—

Stiles, knocked off the side of the bed and onto the floor again. He was the one who had been talking, not a doctor. He was the one who had taken hold of Derek’s arm. He was the only other person in the dark room, no white coats or fluorescent lights or lasers or any of the things that loomed so brightly in Derek’s fevered mind.

Still fighting for breath, Derek groped at his own chest, half-expecting to find a gaping hole and the bloody slickness of exposed bone beneath his fingertips, but there was only smooth skin.

The feeling wasn’t real. It was just a dream, a nightmare. A memory.

Derek let his head fall back against the pillow. It was thin and flat, but it was a far cry from an examination table, so he pressed back against it harder, turned until he could bury his nose in the fabric and breathe in the musty scent of it. He wasn’t there. He was _out,_ and his senses could prove it if he let them. He tried to focus on the smell of the pillow, the feel of a mattress and scratchy sheets underneath him, the distant hum of the mag-tram lines outside. The much nearer tattoo of Stiles’ heart, faster than it should be.

Stiles was up on his knees now, kneeling by the bed and watching Derek warily. He had a hand outstretched, but it hovered in the air without making contact. He pulled it back sharply when he saw that Derek was watching him.

“Man, are you...okay?” he asked. He tapered off at the end, like he knew it was a stupid question but didn’t have anything else to say.

Derek wanted to say yes but it would be a lie, and he wasn’t sure he could speak yet anyway. There was still a phantom pain in his chest, like his lungs were raw and burned. He pressed his palm to the spot to remind himself that it wasn’t real. He was out and he was whole. He managed a nod.

Stiles blew out a long breath, fingers running through his hair. His heart was still pounding, and his scent was shot through with anxiety, but he mirrored Derek’s nod.

“That was, uh…” he started, then stopped to clear his throat. “Hell of a nightmare there. Was it about— I mean, I assume it was about the—”

Stiles cut himself off, but Derek didn’t need for him to finish the question. He knew what Stiles was asking. Stiles had heard enough from Danny to know where Derek had been, what he had escaped from. He knew what Derek had had done to him, or at least he knew a bit of it. He already knew that, which meant there was only one reason he could be asking.

“Your friend,” Derek rasped. “Scott. He was like me?”

Stiles looked at him sharply, eyes looking almost black in the darkness of the room. It took him a long moment to answer. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, he was.”

A werewolf then. Not what anybody wanted to be in the city. There weren’t many werewolves stupid enough to try and live on first level, and none at all in the city center. Some werewolves managed to eke out a decent living on second level if they kept their heads down, didn’t draw attention to themselves, and some others chose to make some sort of home for themselves in the hot, muggy labyrinth of pipes and maintenance tunnels that made up third level.

But every werewolf, no matter where, lived with the constant fear of being collected, of being snatched up by Enforcers and taken away to somewhere they would never come back from. The official stance was that the facilities were medical research laboratories, with all of their practices perfectly ethical and humane as they strove to invent more effective treatments and preventions for disease, to expand the human lifespan, to push medical science further into the future.

Werewolves had advantages that humans could only achieve through mechanical intervention—accelerated healing factor, exceptional senses, strength and speed and agility, even a slightly extended natural life expectancy. There was never any mention in the advertisements that the smiling scientists on the holoscreens were experimenting on live specimens, trying to find ways to replicate those advantages in humans by any means necessary, but everyone outside the center knew. Every werewolf knew what their fate was if they were collected, just like they knew to run when they heard mag-boots in the distance.

Scott had known, surely. Just like Derek had known.

“When was he taken?” Derek asked.

Again, it was a long time before Stiles said anything, long enough that Derek started to think he wasn’t going to answer at all. Then:

“Five years. Five years since I—”

Stiles’ mouth shut with a snap, a muscle in his jaw clenching as he gritted his teeth. Abruptly, he twisted around to sit down heavily, leaning his back up against the bed so that Derek couldn’t see his face anymore.

“I was there,” he said, barely above a whisper. “When they came for him. I tried to stop them from taking him away.”

Derek shook his head, even though Stiles wouldn’t see it. “There’s no stopping it.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Stiles said, scent spiking with something like old anger, or like shame. “I almost did. He could’ve gotten away.” He gave a weak huff of laughter, shoulders slumping. “But Enforcers don’t like my kind any more than they do yours. When they realized what I was doing, they turned on me instead.”

Derek had no trouble believing that. Technopathy wasn’t strictly illegal in the technical sense, but then neither were werewolves. The only difference was that, while werewolves could be controlled and subjugated with particular chemicals, electric currents, and restraints made of certain materials, there were even fewer ways to suppress a technopath’s ability. And in an environment where practically everything relied on electronics to function, a skilled technopath was practically impossible to contain.

Which was why most of them were hunted down and taken out before they could learn to harness their abilities. If Stiles at fourteen had had enough control of his power to hold off a pair of Enforcers long enough for their target to escape, then it was no wonder that dealing with him had taken priority. They had probably wanted him dead rather than captured; someone like that was too much of a threat.

“I don’t really remember all of it, to be honest,” Stiles told him. “Too much too fast. I just know Scott came back for me instead of saving himself. That’s the kind of friend he was, you know? He couldn’t just leave me behind. There was a lot of fighting, and we got split up. One minute we were running and the next, I was alone and Scott was gone—”

Stiles’ voice broke. He sniffed, and there was a tang of salt in the air.

Derek stayed quiet; it wasn’t like there was anything he could say that would help or make it better.

A part of him wanted to say that he _wished_ he couldn’t remember getting taken, but that wouldn’t do either of them any good. Derek had every second of that day seared into his memory in technicolor: pelting through the streets, Laura’s back ahead of him and Cora’s hand held tight in his; the echo of mag-boots ringing all around them; the flash of blonde hair bright and startling against the darkness of nighttime; the bloody glare of the Enforcer’s eye mods, somehow so different from the natural glow of his mother’s alpha reds. He remembered the pain of an electrified bolt in his back, slamming into him and sending him skidding along the ground, and the sound of his sisters’ screams as they went down too.

If it had been anything like that for Stiles, then Derek envied him his forgetfulness.

“I thought Scott was dead,” Stiles said with the weight of some shameful admission. “All this time, I really thought that he was dead.”

“I thought Cora was dead too,” Derek told him. The words nearly got stuck in his throat, even now that he was reasonably sure he’d been wrong. They still felt like too much, like they were real and huge and _wrong_ in a way that made him ache all over. “I watched her die.”

“Well, apparently not.”

Derek felt the beginnings of a smile tug at the corner of his mouth; it took him by surprise. “Apparently not,” he repeated.

With one hand, he reached over the bedside to grope around on the floor until he came up with the blanket Stiles had dragged to the floor with him.

“Enough talking,” he said, pulling it over himself as he took up position facing the wall again. “Get back up here and go to sleep.”

There was a pause as Stiles considered that order, weighing the risks. “Sure you won’t knock me off on the floor again?”

“I make you no promises.”

Stiles heaved a sigh, loud and exaggerated, but he levered himself off the floor anyway. This time, when Stiles settled in alongside him, Derek didn’t let him take the covers for himself. Instead he kept hold of his end, letting the blanket stretch over the both of them. It was warmer that way, and that much harder not to feel the brush of Stiles’ back against his with every breath he took. Derek found, though, that he didn’t mind. He matched his breathing to Stiles’, tuning in to the thump of his heart, and it was actually sort of nice.

“G’night, Derek,” Stiles muttered. “Sleep better.”

“Goodnight, Stiles,” Derek responded, but he was pretty sure Stiles was already asleep. It didn’t take long for Derek to follow him down.


	4. Chapter 4

Derek woke to a series of loud thumps. Instantly on alert, he nearly shredded the blanket in his attempt to get it off him, searching for the threat only to find Stiles. He was, yet again, in a heap on the floor, though this time it seemed like he had gotten there through his own clumsiness instead of being dropped there by someone else.

He was also not fully clothed. His pants were on but he was barefoot and bare-chested, wet hair plastered to his forehead and dripping down his neck; it looked like he had come back from taking a shower and tripped over his own boots left in front of the door. His attempts to get back on his feet were hazardous in their own right, but it made all the muscles in his back ripple and flex, and there was more strength hidden in his thin frame than his baggy clothes had led Derek to believe.

“Sorry!” Stiles grunted, finally achieving a semi-upright position. He had water droplets chasing their way down his chest, disappearing into the trail of hair that led to his waistband. “Sorry, my bad! Ignore me, I’m good, I’m fine!”

Derek’s eyes snapped up to Stiles’ face. He scowled and growled out, “You owe Mason a new blanket.”

Stiles made a noise of indignation. “You’re the one who ripped it up!”

“Because you came crashing in here making me think we were under attack,” Derek said. That was why his heart rate was still too fast. He balled up the blanket in his hands, pushing himself to his feet so he could glare at Stiles more effectively. The two of them were almost the same height, maybe an inch between them, but that inch was just enough to give Derek the advantage. “I swear, mag-boots are quieter than you.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you too, pal.”

Stiles made a face at him that was very reminiscent of a bratty little sibling and Derek made one back on reflex. It was just as much of a reflex for his gaze to fall down again, back to the large expansive of bare skin on display. Derek looked away just as quickly, but not quickly enough to keep Stiles from following the motion. His cheeks went a blotchy red and he crossed his arms, covering as much of his chest as he could.

“Hey, not all of us can be muscly and flawless, okay?” he snapped. “Some of us have to settle for scrawny and pale. Take your judgment elsewhere, fur-face.”

Derek was the one flushing now; that hadn’t been what he was thinking at _all._ Hell if he was going to admit that, though. He shoved the blanket into Stiles’ stomach and said, “Just put some damn clothes on.”

Derek skirted around Stiles on his way to the door, stopping only to snatch up his own pair of boots. The room was far from spacious though, and his shoulder brushed against Stiles’ on his way past. His skin was warm, even through the sturdy fabric of Derek’s shirt, just like it had been last night. Derek swallowed down another growl, feeling strangely off kilter.

When he got downstairs, he found Kira in the kitchen with Mason, who was stirring another pot of stew and whistling. Mason smiled at him as he came in.

“Good morning!” he said, unreasonably cheerful. “Sleep well?”

“Stiles ruined your blanket,” Derek told him. Factually untrue, yes, but true in spirit. Maybe he was still a little grumpy from his rude awakening, and a tiny bit spiteful for reasons he didn’t want to look too closely at.

Mason’s grin dimmed, but he said, “Oh… Well, that’s okay. I can get another.”

Before Derek had a chance to feel at all guilty, footsteps came thundering down the stairs and Stiles careened around the corner and into the room.

“Am I too late for food? Also anything Derek said is a lie.” He squinted around at them all. “Where’s Braeden, did she leave without us?”

“There’s still food,” Mason assured him, ladling stew into bowls and passing one to each of them. Stiles’ looked like it had less than anyone else’s, but that might’ve been Derek’s imagination.

“Gotta eat it fast, though,” Kira said, comm-pad open and active. “Braeden’s scouting ahead for a clear path. She should be on her way back soon and we’re gonna meet her at the nearest crossroad. So eat up and let’s go.”

It only took a few minutes for the stew to be eaten, the bowls passed back, and everyone’s shoes and restocked backpacks retrieved, and then Mason was shepherding them to the front door with an anxious fluttering of his hands.

“You’ve got everything you came with?” he asked, looking them over critically one more time. “You don’t want to leave anything behind because you’ll probably never get it back. Sometimes Enforcers come knocking for random inspections and I have to burn everything that can be traced back to people that aren’t me.”

“Oh wow,” Stiles said, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, no, I think we’re good. No burning required here.”

Mason nodded several times in quick succession and raised a hand to the panel on the door, but he changed his mind before he’d entered more than two digits of the code.

“Don’t forget to go right at the fork,” he said to Kira. “Liam went left at the fork once and ended up—”

“Mason, have I ever gone left at the fork?” Kira asked with an air of great patience that said she had had this conversation before. “I know how to get to the crossroad. I’ve run this line a dozen times. We will be fine.”

“Right,” Mason said. He turned back to the door panel, punching in a long string of numbers until something beeped and the door unlatched. With one more smile, he held the door open for them and said, “Go in peace. I hope you make it.”

Leaving Mason’s was a different route than getting there had been, but it all looked so similar that it didn’t matter much. Derek stuck close to Kira and followed her lead through the narrow alleyways, keeping an ear out to make sure that Stiles was still behind him and hadn’t tripped and fallen headfirst down a manhole or something. After this morning, Derek wouldn’t put it past him. And after last night—

Well, Derek wasn’t sure how he felt about last night. He just knew that Stiles’ scent clung to his clothes, and that he didn’t mind.

The three of them reached the crossroad promptly and without getting lost. This early in the morning, there wasn’t anyone wandering the streets yet, though a pair of shockers were asleep—or possibly overloaded—on the far corner.

As Kira drew to a stop alongside the mag-tram tracks, she looked to one direction and then to the other. She tapped at the comm-pad in her shoulder. She frowned.

An uneasy feeling rose up in Derek’s stomach. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Wait, wrong?” Stiles echoed, alarmed. “Why would something be wrong? Nothing’s wrong, is it?”

Kira shot them both a quelling look and said, “Braeden’s just a little late. She probably had to reroute unexpectedly. It happens sometimes.”

Judging by the way Kira kept tapping at her comm-pad with that frown still in place, it didn’t usually happen without Braeden radioing in to alert her to the change of plans. Derek tightened his grip on the straps of his backpack and gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.

Stiles was less restrained in his agitation. He paced, long legs taking him back and forth, and he kept coming back to the tracks to peer as far into the distance as he could in either direction. Derek tried to extend his hearing, see if he could pick up anything useful, but Stiles’ overly fast heartbeat was loud and insistent in his ears.

When he’d first talked to her, Derek had come to the conclusion that Braeden held some measure of affection for Stiles, despite their antagonistic behavior. Now it was obvious that Stiles cared about her too.

With a huff of frustration, Stiles planted himself in the middle of the tracks as if that position would somehow afford him a better view. When it didn’t, he rounded on Kira.

“Why isn’t she back by now?” he demanded. “She should be here!”

“Stiles, get off the tracks,” Derek said, but Stiles ignored him.

“Something’s gotta be wrong. We have to go find her.”

Kira hesitated, bottom lip caught between her teeth. “I could maybe radio back to Danny,” she said. “Have him pull up her last coordinates. But we can’t move as fast as she can, Stiles. Even if she was in trouble, there’s no guarantee we’d be able to get to her in time to do anything about it.”

Stiles shook his head, eyes darting down the tracks again. There was still nothing in sight, not even to Derek’s more acute eyes. He stretched his hearing again, just in case, and this time he thought maybe there was a buzz.

“And besides,” Kira went on. “Without Braeden scouting the way, we have no way of knowing what areas are safe to travel in.”

“Well, we can’t just sit around and do nothing!” Stiles cried.

“Shh,” Derek tried, closing his eyes to better focus in on the auditory. There was definitely a buzz, faint but getting louder. “Do you guys hear that?”

It didn’t do any good; the others weren’t paying any attention to him.

“We can’t just go wandering through the city,” Kira insisted. “You’ve both got active warrants out on you. We’ll have Enforcers on our tail before we can say ‘moving target’!”

The buzz grew into a whine, high-pitched and urgent as it closed in on their location. Derek tracked it to the left, squinting until he could make out a dark shape, flying toward them at high speed.

Flying down the tracks that Stiles was still standing on, no longer keeping watch for incoming.

There was no time to yell out a warning. Stiles hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that his modified mag-boots were faster than the standard issue. A collision at those speeds would most likely kill them both. Derek didn’t stop to think of anything else. He just jumped.

He hit Stiles broadside, tackling him to the ground a split-second before the rush of wind and screech of brakes that was Braeden shooting past the spot Stiles had been. They hit the ground hard and rolled, Derek’s arms wrapped around Stiles’ middle to shield him from the worst of it. They came to a stop, winded and battered, near the street corner where the shockers were sprawled out and oblivious.

It took a few seconds for Derek to get breath back into his lungs, to come down from the high of adrenaline and verify that neither of them was dead or dying. Stiles was coughing though, inhaling the dirt the impact had kicked up with every panicked gasp he took. His back, pressed tight to Derek’s chest, heaved with the force of it, but he didn’t seem to be injured. Once the worst of the coughing fit had passed, he pushed at Derek’s arm to free himself.

Derek had to force his hands to unclench and his arms to relax their grip. It wasn’t easy.

As soon as he had, Stiles was scrambling to his feet and back toward the tracks, calling Braeden’s name. Derek followed, wincing at his collection of new bruises and scrapes. They weren’t too bad, considering, and Stiles and Braeden weren’t a red smear on the pavement, so they were worth it. They were already starting to heal anyway.

Stiles and Kira were a ways down the line, kneeling close together. As Derek drew closer, he was relieved to find Braeden awake and moving, doing her damnedest to brush the both of them off.

“I’m fine,” she was saying. “Had a bit of a run-in with some mod-scavs, but I’m fine.”

“One day,” Kira said tightly, thermal scan in process, searching for any indications of injury, “those mod-scavs are gonna learn that they can’t scavenge mods that are still in use.”

“Apparently they can,” Derek put in.

Braeden gave him a dirty look, deftly slapping Stiles’ hands away without even having to look at them.

“Please,” she scoffed. “They didn’t get anything off me.” She tried to push herself to her feet, but the comm-pad in her chest panel sparked and fizzed and her arm gave out from under her. Stiles and Kira both reached out to steady her as she hissed in pain. “They might’ve got a few hits in though,” she admitted. “Fucked up the brakes on my boots too.”

“That explains why you didn’t radio in, at least,” Kira said. A twisted piece of metal broke off in her hand when she touched it and she cursed under her breath. “We’re gonna have to go back to Mason’s,” she said. “It’ll put us back by a day, but you need repairs and we can’t go on without you.”

“Um, ex _cuse_ me,” Stiles said with a grand gesture toward himself. “I’m right here. Who do you think usually does her repairs anyway? I can fix her up and get her back on her feet before noon. We don’t need to waste time backtracking.”

Kira and Braeden exchanged an uneasy look.

“Out here in the open?” Kira asked. “What about—?”

Derek tracked her eye-line to the corner of the nearest building’s roof, and then to the one beside it. He couldn’t see any indication of cameras or other surveillance equipment, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think that meant it wasn’t there. The mainframe was full of covert footage of anyone and everyone. Their only saving grace was that most of the time, no one was watching, or the people who were didn’t care about minor infractions. But if they saw something big, something like an active technopath, the Enforcers would know in a nanosecond.

Stiles just scoffed. “Please! The first thing a ‘path learns if they want to survive,” he said, “is how to glitch out cameras without raising alarms. C’mon.”

Derek stepped in to help heave Braeden onto her feet, Kira on her other side and Stiles leading the way to a sheltered alcove two buildings down from the shockers. They got Braeden situated on the cleanest patch of pavement—far from pristine, but Braeden wasn’t exactly the prissy type—and stood back to give Stiles room to work.

“I’m going to keep watch,” Kira told them, a twist of anxiety in her scent. “Do a walk-around, make sure the area’s clear. You’re sure you can take care of the cameras?” she asked Stiles.

“Already did,” he said easily. Derek hadn’t seen him do anything at all, but now he was pushing Braeden to lie down on her back. “You don’t happen to have any of those sedatives on you, do you?” he asked her. “I don’t have my stash, but you’re not gonna want to feel any of this. Chest mods are deep and they’re not comfy to mess around with.”

Braeden rolled her eyes. “Because I just carry those around with me all the time,” she muttered. “Just power me down. And be quick about it, will you? We can’t afford to hang around here too long or we’ll miss our window.”

“I’ll be as quick as possible without killing you,” Stiles promised. He gave her a shit-eating grin as he reached out to press a finger to a mod at the base of her skull. “Nighty-night now.”

Braeden went limp, mouth still half open around a thwarted retort. It was such an abrupt and startling change that Derek couldn’t help the impulse he had to listen in, to make sure that her heart was still beating, that she hadn’t just dropped dead.

“What did you do to her?” Derek asked, trying to tamp down on his concern; Stiles obviously wasn’t worried about it, and Kira didn’t come rushing back to protest, so it couldn’t be a bad thing, no matter how much it disturbed Derek that a press of a button could shut a person down. He’d never seen anything like that.

Stiles glanced up, saw whatever look was on his face, and snorted.

“She’s fine, fur-face,” he said. “Half her brain is cybertronic. Most of the Enforcers’ are. Helps them regulate and control their hydraulic systems better than a human brain could. It also coincidentally cuts down on the need for sleep to have large portions of their functioning brain be literally rechargeable.”

“And you can really just...turn her off?” Derek asked.

“It’s only part of her that’s off,” Stiles said. “And she can’t stay like that for too long. It puts strain on the human half of the brain that’s not used to supporting all the autonomic functions alone anymore. But it’s fine for a few hours, which should be plenty for this.”

As he talked, Stiles settled himself cross-legged on the ground beside Braeden’s still form. He held his hands out over the scratched up mess of her torso, right above the worst of the damage to her chest panel. He didn’t touch. He didn’t do much of anything, from what Derek could tell. He just closed his eyes, a slight furrow between his eyebrows. It was the stillest and quietest Derek had seen him be, and Derek got the impression that he was concentrating very hard, that he was _seeing_ things in that way that technopaths could.

Derek lowered himself to the ground on Braeden’s other side, slow and careful not to make any noise that could distract Stiles. He remembered what Stiles had said back at the hub, how much he had protested at the thought of working with an internal mod that he wasn’t familiar with. He must have done a lot of work with chest mods and comm-pads before to be so confident in fixing this one, which made sense; they were a lot more common than rem-dacs.

For a long time, nothing seemed to happen at all. Every once in a while, Stiles’ fingers would move, a twitch here and a twist there like he was pushing and prodding at something Derek couldn’t see, something buried deep under the surface, but there was no visible change to the damage itself.

Derek watched and fought against the urge to move; sitting still for so long had him looking over his shoulder, feeling that itch on the back of his neck like someone was standing right behind him and looming over his shoulder. He didn’t like being off schedule, not when their guides had made such a big deal of being on time.

He was about to get up to stretch his legs, shake off the creeping dread, maybe track down Kira and make sure she was alright, but movement caught his eye. It was quick and small and it took a few seconds for Derek to pinpoint the source: a bent panel, unbending. A loose screw was next, spinning itself back into place. Then a cracked light flickered back to life.

One by one, the defects in Braeden’s chest panel began to right themselves. Pieces of metal that were torn apart didn’t meld back together and the comm-pad screen’s glass stayed cracked, but everything that had been displaced found its way back and settled in like it had never left.

And all through it, Stiles never even opened his eyes. There was something in the air though, something like an electric charge, like static cling. Derek would’ve expected something like that to make his skin crawl, but it was strangely energizing. He wanted to touch Stiles’ hands and see if that power was gathered there, if it would shock him like a livewire, if it would give him that same high that all shockers chased with every plug-in. He’d never understood the appeal of that before.

When the last screw was secure and the last light sluggishly blinking, Stiles let out a long breath. His eyes opened, a little glazed and distant, and his hands finally dropped down to rest in his lap. He swayed a bit, shaking his head like maybe he was dizzy or lightheaded.

“Are you alright?” Derek asked. His voice sounded very loud after so long in silence.

“Fine,” Stiles said hoarsely. “Just a little tired. That was a more involved repair than I expected from the external damage.”

“You got it fixed though,” Derek said, gesturing to the repaired panel. “She’ll be okay?”

“She’ll be okay,” Stiles confirmed. He shook out his hands, flexing the fingers and rolling his shoulders. “Still gotta fix her mag-boot.”

Derek frowned, but Stiles was already relocating himself so he swallowed down his protest. If Stiles thought he was up for another repair, it wasn’t really Derek’s place to question that. Insisting he take a rest was something a friend or a loved one would do, and Derek was pretty sure he didn’t qualify as either of those things. And there was still the timetable to consider. Kira would probably be back soon, and it would be in all of their best interests if they could get moving. They just had to make it to the city wall without getting caught and they would be safe.

Well, not completely. There was still the rem-dac. Derek couldn’t feel it anymore now that it wasn’t secreting poison into his system, but it was still there and he couldn’t help but be aware of its presence. He pressed his palm against that spot, trying to soothe a phantom ache as he watched Stiles work.

The ‘path didn’t have his eyes closed this time, presumably because the damage to Braeden’s boot was superficial instead of buried so he could watch it the normal way. Components shifted under his hands, spurred into motion by nothing more than the force of Stiles’ will alone. It was uncanny.

“How did you learn to do all this?” Derek found himself asking.

Stiles made a thoughtful noise without looking up from his task. “A lot of study and practice,” he said. “Some trial and error. And a whole lot of mistakes.”

Something in his scent went sour, even as his expression stayed blank and focused and his hands remained steady.

“You know, most technopaths end up dead as kids,” Stiles offered up, tone strangely light. “After their ability first manifests, but before they can figure out how to use it effectively. Most of us never get the chance to work our way up to stuff like this. Really, when it comes right down to it—” His hands fell, their task completed. “—I’m one of the lucky ones.”

The heartbeat beneath the words was steady, but his scent still had that darkness to it that felt like regret, like guilt. Derek had a sudden urge to touch Stiles, to lay a hand on his back or something, _anything,_ to provide some kind of comfort. He knew how warm Stiles’ back would be if he did and how that heartbeat would feel under his palm, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move, not even as Stiles cleared his throat and stood.

“Alright, let’s wake her up,” he said, like he hadn’t said anything. Like the last few minutes hadn’t happened at all.

He knelt down by Braeden’s shoulder and found that spot on her skull mod. It took longer for her to turn back on, more like a natural awakening. Her eyelids fluttered and she shifted, rising into consciousness bit by bit until she was peering groggily up at them. One hand came up to prod at her chest and found a functional panel instead of the ragged mess that had been there before.

“Got me all fixed up?” she rasped.

“‘Course I did, Brae. As if I’d do anything less for my favorite customer,” Stiles said.

He offered her a hand and she took it, letting him drag her off the ground and onto her feet. She stretched and cracked her back, rolled her shoulders, and squinted critically down at her boots to make sure they were up to snuff as well.

Then she caught sight of Derek, cross-legged on the ground, and her gaze lingered on his chest. His hand was still there, over the rem-dac; he hadn’t noticed. He pulled it away quickly and pushed himself to his feet only to find Braeden still eyeing him.

“Hey, Stiles,” she said. “When are you going to fix our boy here anyway? _That’s_ what we really brought you on for.”

Stiles’s eyes went wide and mildly panicked. He opened and closed his mouth a few times as a hint of red crept up his neck and into his cheeks, but no sound came out. His attention darted to Derek—or more specifically, to Derek’s chest—and then skittered away just as quickly. Derek crossed his arms, shoulders hunching.

“Well, that’s, uh…” Stiles coughed, swallowed hard, gestured vaguely with one hand and then with the other. “I just spent two hours working on you, Brae! That’s a lot of energy spent.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“ _And,_ ” Stiles echoed, drawing the one syllable out obnoxiously, “the rem-dac is really something to be attempted when I’m at a full charge. Metaphorically speaking.”

“Right,” Braeden said.

“I’m just saying, it’s not an endeavor to be undertaken lightly,” Stiles insisted.

Braeden hummed in completely unconvincing agreement. Steady on her feet now, she circled around Stiles toward the street, but she stopped to put a hand on his shoulder and lean in close. Her low voice was still plenty loud enough to Derek’s ears as she said, “Just remember: the longer you wait, the more chances they have to put him down.”

Derek didn’t appreciate the reminder. It sent a shudder of revulsion through him, a persistent itch that made him want to pop claws and scratch his way through skin and muscle and bone until he could yank the threat out himself. He sunk the claws into his palms instead, letting the sting and the hot well of blood distract him.

It was only a matter of time, he told himself. The facility hadn’t detonated his rem-dac yet, so they couldn’t be too concerned with him. He was going to make it out of the city and to wherever his sister was, and he was going to make it there alive. He was going to find Cora and go far enough away that no one could find them again, and everything was going to be fine.

Stiles was pale and tense when Derek brushed past him, but for once he didn’t have anything smart to say.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The anxiety didn’t fade when they started moving again. It settled in Derek’s gut, a low churn that made him glad he hadn’t eaten all that much at breakfast. The back of his neck prickled no matter how many times he glanced back to confirm that there was no one there watching him, and even the buildings on either side of the street felt like they were too close, looming, pressing in.

Being off schedule didn’t help. They were only two hours behind, if that, but the difference it made was significant and it wasn’t long before they found themselves on streets that actually contained people.

Derek pressed close to Stiles, even as everything in him wanted to push and slash and run until he had the space to breathe properly. He hadn’t been around this many people at a time since he’d escaped the facility, since the guards and orderlies had swarmed him with tasers in hand to shock him, bring him down, take him back there. At least Stiles’ scent was familiar, something that registered to Derek’s nose as relatively _safe,_ unlike the strangers that jostled him as they passed. Derek found himself scanning the crowd, searching for white coats or green scrubs, listening hard for the clomp of mag-boots over the low babble of voices.

Braeden kept pushing forward. Literally. She shoved her way through, face grim, as she led the way through streets that would’ve been empty had they come through a few hours ago. Derek and Stiles had to rush a bit to keep up with her, and Kira followed along in their wake, an alert presence at their back, one hand resting on the hilt of her collapsible sword.

A large man with a rusty mod that took up half his bald head came barreling past them, too close on the sidewalk. Derek flinched away and the motion sent him knocking into Stiles’ shoulder.

Stiles side-eyed him, brows pulling down.

“You okay there, big guy?” he asked, looking him over.

Bitterness flared up in Derek, made sharp and hot by the hunted feeling that wouldn’t leave him. _No,_ he thought, _I’ve got a ticking time-bomb in my chest that you’re in no hurry to do anything about._ His stomach rolled and he stuffed his hands in his pockets to hide the claws he couldn’t seem to pull back in.

“I’m fine,” Derek grunted.

Stiles let him get away with that for a whole minute. Then he cleared his throat and said, “So tell me about Cora.”

Derek frowned, thrown. “What?”

“Cora,” Stiles repeated. “Your sister. The one you’re so eager to get back to. Tell me about her.”

“What’s there to tell?” Derek said.

Stiles rolled his eyes, pausing to dodge around a particularly aggressive sidewalk hog as she blew past, mod lights blinking. “I don’t know, man! What’s she like? What does she do for fun? That kind of thing.”

Derek frowned harder. He tried to answer the question, he really did, but _fun_ felt like such a foreign concept that it didn’t quite compute.

Cora had been just fifteen when they’d been collected. Memories of the life they’d had before the facility seemed so far away, hazy and hard to hang onto, like they were from another reality entirely. He could remember Cora’s smile if he tried, young and bright, but so much clearer was the memory of her hoarse screams echoing through the facility hallways, the feel of her small hand gripping tight to his until it slipped away, the desperate gurgle of her breath as the orderly wheeled her away to where Derek couldn’t follow, couldn’t _save her—_

A shoulder rammed into Derek’s and he stumbled, dizzy and off-balance. His breath was coming too fast; he could hear the whistle of it in his ears almost as loud as the voices all around, _voices_ passed over his head by faceless doctors with their scalpels and their lasers and their rem-dacs full of poison, and they’d already killed Cora and it was only a matter of time before they killed him too—

“ _Derek!_ ”

Stiles’ shout was loud and close and it cut through the noise in his head like a scythe. Derek pried his eyes open to find Stiles right in front of him, near enough for him to make out the tiny flecks of green hidden in the brown of Stiles’ wide eyes.

“Hey, come on, man,” Stiles was saying, softer now that he was sure Derek was hearing him. “Come back to me. You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”

Long fingers wrapped around Derek’s wrists, tugging his hands gently away from his head; Derek didn’t remember covering his ears. Stiles didn’t let go, just held on with his fingertips against the soft skin of Derek’s inner wrist where his frantic pulse beat. Stiles’ heartbeat was slower, steadier, and Derek tried to breathe to the rhythm of it.

“That’s it,” Stiles said. “You’re doing fine, you just gotta breathe, okay? Breathing is sort of important.”

Derek nodded mindlessly, taking deep lungfuls of Stiles’ scent. It was warm and sharp, like the tang of lightning in the air before a storm, and it was better than anything in Derek’s memories right now.

With every breath, a bit of the real world came back to him. There was no Cora here, no screams, no pain. There was only a city sidewalk, a steady churn of unconcerned passersby all around, and Stiles holding him steady in the center of it.

Braeden and Kira had halted too. They were pretending not to watch, standing on either side of them like guards. Their protective stance did keep anyone from getting too close though, and the last of the cloying fear seeped out of Derek in a rush that left him shaky and exhausted.

He pulled his wrists out of Stiles’ hold, putting some distance between them. Stiles let him go, but his hands stayed where they were for a few seconds more, hovering in the air until he finally let them fall. Derek rubbed at the places where those hands had touched and a thought from earlier in the day came back to him; yes, there was power there, more than enough for a strange sort of high.

Kira stepped in, cautious. “Derek, are you alright?” she asked. “Do we need to stop, or go back?”

Derek shook his head despite how the motion made his head ache. “No,” he said. “No, I’m fine.” They needed to keep moving, to get where they were going. He needed to find Cora and see with his own eyes that she was alive and safe. Even if the rem-dac dropped him a second later, he just needed to see his sister. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “We should go.”

“Okay,” Braeden said. “Then let’s go.”

Stiles was a little more reluctant, but he fell in step with the rest of them anyway, throwing sidelong looks at Derek that were hard to decipher. Derek ignored them, head down and steps heavy. Just one foot in front of the other, that was what would get him to Cora. That was all that mattered. Even if having Stiles’ eyes on him made Derek’s heart beat faster in a way that, for once, didn’t feel like fear.


	5. Chapter 5

No one mentioned Derek’s freak out again, which his pride appreciated. As the morning wore on into early afternoon, they moved out of the heavily trafficked area and into a sector that was much more sparsely populated. When they stopped for lunch, they were able to find a street corner devoid of people for them to settle down on.

A sandwich helped to chase away the last of the tremor from Derek’s hands, and the solitude was a balm on his frayed nerves. He kept his back to the wall while they ate and by the time they set out again, he was feeling almost normal.

The trek was mostly a quiet one. Braeden and Kira were on alert, watching for any potential threat as they navigated their way carefully through the city, and Stiles alternated between examining the scenery and tapping at the screen on his forearm. Derek wasn’t sure if he was studying something or playing games, but he _was_ sure that Stiles was still keeping a close eye on him, even if he couldn’t seem to catch him looking anymore.

It was late afternoon before the wall came into view. A huge construction of concrete and steel, the wall enclosed the entire city, tall enough to dwarf everything but the skyscrapers in the distant city center and thick enough that no battering ram could hope to make a dent. The gates were mechanized and so high tech that Derek couldn’t even conceive of how they worked. He only knew there was no way through unauthorized, or he’d thought that was the case.

The sight of that wall breaking over the horizon ahead of them sent a strange thrill through Derek, half-anticipation and half-dread. If Danny’s intel was to be believed, then his sister was beyond that wall. He just had to make it there.

Evening brought with it an increase in streetwalkers again. On second level, it was always dark and no one hesitated to do their shady business whenever they could, but first level had at least the illusion of daytime that made people think twice before dealing openly. Not to mention the infinitely higher chance of Enforcer patrols. Whatever it was, the dimming of the grey skies seemed to be the signal for business to start up again, at least in this sector.

Derek was prepared for it this time, mentally braced against the claustrophobic feeling. That didn’t mean he wasn’t sadly grateful when Stiles sidled in close, a reassuring warmth against his shoulder.

Braeden led them across a set of mag-tram tracks and around a corner before holding her hand up for a halt. Ahead of them was a throng of people all clustered around one building, the door propped open but guarded by a very large man with a retinal scan mod. He was letting people in one by one. Strobe lights flashed from behind him, synth music pumping out into the street.

Derek took a closer look at the prospective patrons; they were an eager bunch, twitching with the need to get inside, the need to plug in. It was another shocker hub, and a much more popular one than Lydia’s humble establishment.

Stiles shifted beside him, leaning around Braeden’s back to get a better look. A stray beam of strobe light reflected off the metal plate that was the cranial uplink set into the base of his skull. He made a thoughtful noise in his throat.

“No,” Kira said, appearing suddenly over his shoulder.

Stiles jerked away from her. Then his surprise was taken over by indignation.

“I wasn’t!” he cried. “What, did you think I was gonna ditch you to go get buzzed? Why do you automatically assume that?”

“Because you’re a shocker,” Braeden said without the slightest hint of apology, most of her attention still on the street ahead as she planned their way through.

“I am not,” Stiles protested, his whole head moving with the force of his eyeroll.

“You plug in all the time. I’ve plugged you in myself,” Kira reminded him.

“I shock recreationally,” he said, “when the boredom of living life under the Enforcers’ radar threatens to kill me. Never more than twice a week, though. That shit will fry your circuits if you do it too much. Not to mention, I’m pretty sure my dad would kill me from beyond the grave.”

“So you’re not twitching for it?” Derek asked. It was sort of hard to tell with Stiles; he was just a restless person in general, always moving, always fidgeting with something, and Derek got the impression he had been like that long before he started shocking.

Stiles shrugged. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice,” he allowed with a wistful look toward the hub. Then he shook his head and threw Derek a grin. “We got somewhere to be, though. We’re on a schedule, remember?”

Derek grinned back before he could stop himself.

“Whatever,” Braeden said. “Just keep your plug to yourself, and look alive. Hubs like this are a mod-scav’s paradise and I think today’s already proven that they’ll tear you to pieces if they get the chance.”

That sobered everyone considerably, three pairs of eyes falling to the scratches and cracks in Braeden’s chest panel that Stiles hadn’t been able to repair. For once, Derek was glad to be a werewolf if it meant there was nothing for a mod-scav to try to rip out of him, although the insane idea did cross his mind to find a scav and tell them about the rem-dac buried in his chest, see if they would claw him open to get to it.

At Braeden’s signal, the four of them set off down the sidewalk. Their path would take them directly past the hub’s entrance, which wasn’t ideal but any rerouting would likely force them to go at least two blocks out of their way and that wasn’t an appealing prospect when they were still making up time from the delay that morning.

So they clumped tight together and pushed on, trying to skirt around the edges of the group as much as possible. The shockers barely gave them a passing glance, too preoccupied with getting to the front of the line to care about the newcomers elbowing them out of the way. The hub’s doorman eyed them suspiciously from his post but made no move against them. With how jumpy Derek was already feeling, the orange glow of the man’s eye mods made the hair on his arms stand on end in a way that Mason’s hadn’t.

He shook off the feeling and refocused on the task at hand. The shockers weren’t working against them, but they certainly weren’t being cooperative either. Braeden was having to actually _push_ people to clear a path, and the displaced shockers just pressed back in as soon as she was past. Shoulders and elbows and wayward hands dug into Derek’s sides and bumped into his back. A few nearly hit him in the face.

Stiles didn’t seem to be doing much better, if the yelps and curses coming from him were any indication. Derek couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying over the thumping synth bass, twice as loud this close to the hub’s entrance, but he heard Stiles’ shout of pain loud and clear.

Suddenly Stiles was gone from his place at Derek’s side, the space already filling with oblivious shockers pushing in the other direction. Derek barely caught sight of him disappearing into the throng before the crowd was too thick between them and he was moving before he realized it. He called out for Braeden and Kira, hoping they could hear him over all the noise, but he couldn’t stop to make sure.

By the time he broke through and into the open air, Stiles was halfway across the street, stumbling as he tried to yank his arm free from the man who had a hold of it.

No, not a man. Mod-scavs barely qualified as human, more rightly somewhere between machine and animal with their humanity lost in the middle. There was barely any flesh to be seen on this one, replaced most everywhere with metal: mods, enhancements, comm-panels, processors, metal limbs with hydraulic joints, maybe even a cybernetic brain upgrade, and anything else they could get their hands on.

Whoever the scav had been before, that person wasn’t present anymore. What was left behind didn’t care for anything but getting what it wanted, and what it wanted right now was Stiles’ multipurpose processor. The problem was that it was surgically implanted in Stiles’ forearm.

Stiles fought and dug his heels in, trying to pull free, but the scav was stronger than he was by a lot and it didn’t do any good. The scav was dragging him inexorably into an alley, away from any witnesses that might intervene before it could get the job done.

Derek was not going to let that happen. There was an empty rushing sound in his ears, a flood of adrenaline in his veins as images of Cora being wheeled away from him flashed before his eyes, and Laura before her. He wasn’t going to let anyone else be taken away from him.

He ran, leaping the mag-tram tracks and launching himself toward the alley mouth as footsteps sounded behind him: Braeden and Kira catching up. Stiles was still struggling, a futile endeavor for a human with no enhancements, but Stiles wasn’t just human. He was a technopath facing down a creature that was made up almost entirely of technology. He should’ve been able to drop the scav with a wave of his hand. Why was he holding back?

Then Derek saw the way that Stiles’ panicked gaze skittered from one building corner to another, scanning the rooftops. Looking for cameras. There were cameras everywhere around the city, and busy as he was with trying to keep his arm from being ripped off, Stiles didn’t have the time or the concentration to shut them down without raising alarms. He was stuck between being a mod-scav’s snack and risking calling the Enforcers down on all of them.

As it turned out, he shouldn’t have worried about the latter.

Derek skidded around the corner into the alleyway with Kira and Braeden on his heels only to come face to face with, not a mod-scav like he’d been expecting or even a swarm of them, but two Enforcers. The scav let go of Stiles, the abrupt release sending him crashing back onto his ass at Derek’s feet, and scurried up to the Enforcers instead, hands held out expectantly. The Enforcer on the left dropped a mess of wires and circuits into the scav’s palms and it made a strange, clicking sort of tittering sound before it took off down the alley with its new treasure.

“What do we have here?” one of the Enforcers asked, a cruel smile on his metal-studded face. Blue flared in his eyes, some kind of wireless uplink mod likely giving him access to a database. “A couple of fugitives.”

“Our lucky day,” the other said. One of his hands had already been replaced by a plasma-shot gun and the whine of it charging sent cold fear dripping down Derek’s spine.

Kira was less intimidated. Between one second and the next she had drawn the hilt from her belt and released the blade, wielding the sword with both hands, and said, “I don’t think so.”

When the Enforcers laughed, Stiles scrambled to his feet, using Derek as a handhold to pull himself up and out of the direct line of fire. His heart was pounding and he reeked of fear, but he held his ground with the rest of them.

“Look, guys,” he said, forcing some approximation of a jovial expression onto his face. “Don’t you have better things to do? Two of you after little ol’ us. I mean, honestly, are we really worth all this effort?”

“An escaped wolf and a renegade ‘path?” the first Enforcer said.

“ _And_ a defector,” the second put in helpfully, eyeing Braeden with disdain. She eyed him back with the same.

“There’s not a one of us who wouldn’t kill for a haul like this,” the first chuckled. “The higher-ups want you bad, kid.”

A new voice rang out from further down the alley, a voice that made Derek’s stomach lurch and roll as the weight of remembered terror slammed into him full force. It brought with it flashes of blonde hair and mechanical red eyes, the same ones that were glowing out of the darkness now, accompanied by an easy smirk.

“Bad enough for more than two of us,” she said. “Congratulations, sweetie, you warrant a whole team.”

For the first time, Braeden tensed, sliding into a fight-ready stance as the new Enforcer came sauntering up alongside her compatriots, the clang of her mag-boots accenting every unhurried step. “Kate,” she snarled.

Kate’s smile grew. “Hey, Brae,” she said. “Long time, no see. Not since you turned traitor and I had to rip your guts out. Have you met my new partner?”

Dark asymmetrical hair and one bright green x-ray mod; Allison, the one who had let Derek go. The one who had told him where to find Lydia and that she would help him. Partnered with the Enforcer who had collected Derek and his sisters so long ago and gotten them locked up in the facility in the first place. Had all of it been a ruse, letting him go, showing him the way? Had Allison set this up herself as some sort of sting operation, a long con to root out who was smuggling people out of the city and put an end to it?

Kira’s sword dropped a bit from its ready stance as she hesitated, uncertain as Allison stared them down with no trace of recognition on her face. Stiles put a hand on Derek’s arm, squeezing hard enough to hurt.

Braeden didn’t react though. She just said, “No, I haven’t. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but I don’t make a habit of lying to people.”

The first Enforcer, the one with the blue mods, rolled his eyes. “Can we cut the chit chat?” he said. A flick of his wrist saw his metal hand retracting to be replaced by a wickedly sharp blade. “I’ve been looking forward to bringing these ones in all day.”

Kate flicked her blonde hair over her shoulder with another of those sickeningly confident smirks and said, “With pleasure.”

Everyone seemed to burst into motion at once. Derek wasn’t aware of choosing to move, but his muscles were bunching and releasing before he could fully comprehend the need to move out of the way and the plasma-shot careened over his head. Derek hit the ground on all fours, claws digging into the ground to steady him and the creeping prickle of the shift overtaking him.

The second Enforcer, the man with the plasma-shot gun for a hand, advanced on him. Derek couldn’t see around him to what the others were doing but the clang of metal against metal was loud in the confined space, so they were fighting. None of them was going down without a fight, least of all him, not after what it had taken to get him here.

Derek’s eyes burned red.

He _roared._

The sound shook the ground under his feet, and it stunned the Enforcer just long enough for Derek to leap at him. He caught him around the middle and took them both to the ground, rolling and grappling, but it was hard to get a hold on someone who had so many unforgiving non-flesh components. Derek’s claws sparked and slid against panels and mods, looking for a place to sink in and tear. They finally found purchase in the Enforcer’s abdomen, low on the left side, and he cried out.

A jolt of electricity ricocheted through Derek and his back hit the ground before the pain of it even registered. His muscles contracted, spasms hard enough to break bone in a human, and his thoughts whited out for a few crucial seconds. When the haze cleared, he found himself being lifted, dangling by the neck, held aloft by the Enforcer’s human hand while the mechanical one—no longer a gun but a taser, the same type of taser the facility guards had used—crackled with charge, ready to put him down for good.

Snarling, Derek lashed out. The Enforcer was just out of arm’s reach, but Derek landed a solid kick to his stomach, right where he’d gotten his claws in earlier, and earned a grunt of pain and a slackening of the fingers around his throat. A hit to the elbow broke his grip completely and Derek staggered backwards out of reach, coughing.

Derek couldn’t see Stiles, but Kira and the blue modded Enforcer were an inhumanly fast whirl of blades nearby, neither of them making contact or giving ground. Braeden was trading blows with Kate and Allison both, but it seemed like more of a cat and mouse game than an actual fight. Kate certainly looked like she was enjoying herself, like she was _toying_ with Braeden, pushing her buttons and seeing how much she could piss Braeden off before she snapped.

Braeden wasn’t rising to the bait. She looked as steady and determined as ever, blocking every punch Kate threw her way with quick, economical movements and striking out herself only when she was sure to get a hit in. Allison hung back a ways, letting her partner take the lead for the most part, but she was far from a passive observer.

“ _Derek, look out!_ ”

Stiles’ warning was just enough for Derek to duck a heavy swing of his opponent’s fist. A kick to the back of his leg sent Derek down to one knee, but he didn’t stay there long. He twisted and rolled and came up on his feet, claws at the ready and teeth bared. The Enforcer had blood seeping through his shirt and his smile was stained red, but he waved Derek forward with two taunting fingers.

Derek wasn’t stupid enough to take him up on the invitation. The taser mod still glowed bright and vicious, emitting the buzz and sizzle sound that Derek was thoroughly conditioned to associate with extreme pain. He wasn’t eager to be subjected to it again, and any direct attack of his was likely to end up with just that result. But that didn’t leave Derek a whole lot of options.

Kira cried out in pain. Her Enforcer had caught her across the upper arm. The gash didn’t look too deep, but it was long and bloody and her grip on her weapon faltered as the muscle threatened to give out. Her opponent raised his blade again, ready to strike, and Derek saw it almost in slow motion.

Kira wasn’t going to be able to parry it in time.

Before Derek could do anything—maybe rush forward to help, throw himself between them, even just call out her name—the Enforcer stopped, his entire body jerking like a puppet on strings. His chest panel crumpled up as if a mallet had been taken to it. A steel plate on his skull popped off to expose a mass of circuitry that writhed and sparked in a way Derek was absolutely sure it was not supposed to do. He slumped to the ground and lay there, twitching until he wasn’t anymore.

Behind him was Stiles, hands raised. His eyes were wide and disbelieving when they locked with Derek’s, like he couldn’t quite comprehend what he had just done. And then they widened further, panic overtaking everything else as he opened his mouth to call out another warning.

It wouldn’t have been enough this time. The shout didn’t register quickly enough for Derek to duck or throw himself aside, or even just to turn around and see what was coming for him. The plasma-shot should have hit him square in the back, burned a hole right through skin and muscle and bone and organ, hot enough to cauterize the gaping wound on its way through.

It should’ve killed him. But it didn’t, because he wasn’t the one it hit.

A flash of dark hair and skull mods blinking red. A punched out gasp for breath, louder than the screech of plasma on metal. The stench of burning flesh and blood.

It didn’t make any sense. Nothing about it made sense but Allison was falling anyway, collapsing as her legs gave out beneath her. Derek caught her, lowered her to the ground as gently as he could as he tried to understand that an Enforcer had just saved his life. Allison had saved his life again.

The plasma-shot gun clattered to the pavement beside them, no longer attached to the arm it had belonged to. An entire chest panel followed, mangled and bloody around the edges, lights still flickering weakly. It left a gaping hole in the Enforcer’s torso and Derek didn’t look any closer. He didn’t want to know if the mod had been bone deep, if the man’s rib cage was bare or his heart exposed. He knew how that felt in himself; he didn’t need to see it.

No one watched the Enforcer fall. Kira was on her knees at Derek’s side, small hands pushing and pulling to get Allison onto her back so they could see the damage. It didn’t look good. The plasma-shot hadn’t managed to burn straight through her as it would have a human, slowed down by all the metal in her body, but that just left the metal twisted and melted and smoking from the heat. And it didn’t stop there from being a hole through the middle of her.

Braeden’s boots came into view, stepping carelessly over the outflung leg of the dead Enforcer, and she bit out a curse as she saw the damage. Derek looked up, looked around, but he didn’t see blonde hair or red eye mods anywhere.

“Where is she?” he asked. “The Enf— Kate. Where did she go?”

“She took off,” Braeden said. “She saw what Stiles could do, and that her backup was gone, and she cut her losses and ran.”

For some reason, that didn’t make Derek feel any better. Maybe it was paranoia, or maybe it was the fact that she had managed to find and attack him _twice_ in his relatively short life, but he had the feeling that this wasn’t the last they would see of her. She would be back, that he was sure of, but in the meantime—

“Allison, can you hear me?” Kira was asking, cradling Allison’s face in her hands.

The half of Allison’s face that wasn’t modded was ashen. There was blood on her lips. She nodded though. She tried to speak, but she barely managed a croak before a cough shook her entire body. Sparks flew from inside the carved out wound in her chest.

“No, no,” Kira said quickly. “Don’t try to talk, just— You just hold on, okay?” She did her best to smile, but it would’ve been a weak gesture even if Derek couldn’t smell the anxiety and the grief already on her skin. She turned back over her shoulder. “Stiles,” she said. “Stiles, you have to help her.”

Derek peered down at the woman laid across his lap. At what was left of her. He would be the first to admit that he didn’t know all there was to know about the kinds of upgrades humans got and how they worked, but he knew more than enough to understand that there was no fixing this.

“Kira,” he tried, but she rounded on him.

“Allison saved you,” she said sharply. “She has saved so many people on this line, Derek, and she risked herself every day to do it. He has to at least _try,_ doesn’t he? We owe her that much.”

Derek couldn’t argue with that, and he didn’t want to. But that didn’t change the fact that if Stiles hadn’t been able to fix the cracks in Braeden’s comm-pad, then there was no way that he could un-melt Allison’s insides. That wasn’t how it worked. Still, he looked to Stiles.

Stiles hadn’t moved from where he had been, standing over the unmoving form of the Enforcer that had fought with Kira. He had yet to lower his hands and his gaze was blank and unfocused. Even from a distance, Derek could hear how erratic his heartbeat was.

“Stiles?” Derek called. He didn’t react, so Derek said it again. “Stiles! Come on, you’re okay. You’re _okay,_ Stiles. Come back to me.”

It still took a few seconds for Stiles to blink himself out of his daze. When he did, his eyes fell to Allison and his breath hitched in his chest. He stepped closer on unsteady legs, but he was already shaking his head.

“Is there anything you can do?” Braeden asked anyway. “You’re pretty good at this stuff.”

“Not that good,” Stiles said, voice little more than a rasp as he stared down at them.

“What do you mean, not that good?” Kira demanded. She had Allison’s human hand in a grip that looked like it could break bone. “You just took out two Enforcers single-handedly!”

“You don’t have to know what you’re doing to break things,” Stiles said. “Breaking things is easy. You can always break things. It’s putting them back together that you sometimes just...can’t do.”

“No.” Kira had tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t ready to give in to them yet. “No, you _can._ You can save her. You just have to try.”

“Kira,” Derek said again, but a rattling breath cut him off.

Allison turned her hand around to thread her fingers through Kira’s. Her blood-flecked lips pulled up into a smile.

“He can’t save me,” she forced out, her voice weak and thready. “He can’t. No one can.”

Her heartbeat was slow, far slower than any healthy person’s could ever be, but it was steady and honest. Derek closed his eyes against tears of his own; they wouldn’t do anyone any good. Instead he wrapped his arms around Allison’s shoulders, shifting her up to lean against his shoulder. Her breath came a little easier that way.

“You fought well, Allison,” Braeden said, the sort of solemn commendation given from one soldier to another. Despite the spike of grief in her scent, there was nothing but resignation and a grim respect in her face. “Your job here is done.”

“Thank you, Brae,” Allison wheezed. “It was an honor...to replace you.”

Braeden huffed a laugh. It sounded like it hurt. “Damn right it was,” she said.

Allison’s modded eye flickered. The green light flashed once, twice, and then went out completely. She ignored it, turning her brown human eye on Stiles.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I always knew I’d...die fighting. And I hoped I’d do it... _helping._ Just like this.”

“I’m sorry,” Stiles said anyway. “I wish I could—”

A high-pitched whine rose up; the cooling fans in Allison’s chest panel struggling to kick in, to do their jobs. Allison grunted in pain, her grip on Kira’s hand tightening. Kira didn’t pull away though. She leaned in closer, stroking the hair from Allison’s forehead with a quiet shushing noise.

Derek laid a hand on the nearest bare skin he could find, a swath on the left side of her neck where it met her shoulder. She was cool to the touch and her pain jumped easily into his veins, tracing up his arm like tendrils of aching fire until they dissipated under the force of his healing. Allison slumped a little more with a sigh. Her heartbeat was frighteningly slow now, barely discernible. A series of hard clicks were coming from somewhere in her chest cavity and she grimaced, pain surging again.

Allison turned her head, temple bumping against Derek’s chin, and said his name. With Kira’s help, Derek shifted her back down a ways, far enough that she could look up at him properly with eyes that had already gone glassy. When her metal hand came up, slow and glitchy, Derek took it. He had to lean in close to hear her when she spoke.

“Power me down,” she said. “Please.”

“What?” Derek asked.

Stiles sniffed, shifting on his feet. “She wants you to turn her cybertronic brain off,” he said thickly. “She’s gonna die anyway. She doesn’t want to feel it.”

A sob forced its way out of Kira’s throat, loud no matter that she tried to smother it in the hand that wasn’t holding on tight to Allison’s. Derek had to take a deep breath and let it out slowly before he could make himself meet Allison’s eyes again. She gave him another of those smiles, squeezing his hand as best she could.

“I hope you make it,” she said, just like she had in their first encounter, when she had let him go.

Derek found the spot at the base of her skull, the same one that Stiles had used on Braeden that morning. He said, “Go in peace.” And he pressed it.

Allison’s eyes fluttered shut. Her hand in Kira’s went limp and slipped free. Her heart beat once more, twice more, and was silent. The distant thump of bass from the shocker hub was loud in the absence of it, filling Derek’s head. Carefully, he let Allison’s still form slide off of his lap and onto the pavement, dark hair fanned out beneath her. He sniffed and stood, feeling creeping back into numb limbs. He looked around at the scrapheap the alleyway had turned into—three bodies, torn into scrap—and breathed in deep.

“We need to go,” he said, “before reinforcements come. They’re probably already on their way. And Stiles—” Derek waited until Stiles acknowledged him, though it was little more than a glance. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of Allison’s body. “—Stiles, I need you to fix me.”

The reaction was instantaneous. Stiles flinched so hard he nearly knocked himself off his feet, denials already spilling out of his mouth.

“No, no, no,” he croaked. “No, I-I can’t do that. I can’t—”

“Derek’s right,” Braeden said, shaking the pall of death off and pulling on her stoic façade. “Once word of this reaches the wrong ears, there’s no way Derek will be worth coming after again. They’ll just put him down and be done with it. If you’re going to shut the rem-dac down, you need to do it now.”

Stiles shook his head, over and over again, breaths coming fast and sharp. He jerked back when Braeden moved to put a hand on his shoulder and then he kept going, stumbling toward the mouth of the alley, away from the carnage of the scene before him.

Braeden started to follow him, but Derek stopped her. She gave him a sharp look, practically daring him to get in the way of her and her friend, but Derek nodded toward Kira instead. She was knelt over Allison’s body, stunned and disbelieving. She still had blood dripping from the wound on her arm.

“Take care of her,” Derek said. “I’ll talk to Stiles.”

It had to be him. No matter how much history there was between Stiles and Braeden, this was something between Stiles and Derek. This was something they needed to do together.

Braeden stared back at him, eyes flinty and lips pressed into a thin line. For a second, Derek thought she might plow right through him. But her eyes flicked back to Kira and the fight went out of her. Then she just looked tired and sad.

“Don’t let him run away from this,” she said. “He’ll never forgive himself.”

Derek nodded. He waited long enough to see Braeden coax Kira away from Allison’s side, and then he followed the path Stiles had taken.

Stiles hadn’t gone far. He was pacing right outside the alley, back and forth in the street with the flashing lights of the hub at his back. His hands were clenched tight in his hair and the scent of salt was strong in the air.

“Stiles,” Derek said. “I need for you to do this.”

“I can’t,” Stiles repeated. His heartbeat was too rapid to tell if he really believed that, but he said it again anyway. “I can’t do that.”

“But you _can,_ ” Derek said. He knew it was all in his head, but the rem-dac seemed to sit so heavy in his chest, like it was weighing against his lungs, growing bigger for every second that ticked by. “Any minute now, Stiles,” he said. “Someone is going to push that button, and they’re going to do it sooner rather than later. They’re going to kill me. Do you care about that at all?”

Stiles made a wounded noise. “Of course I do,” he said. “But—”

“Then _do_ something about it,” Derek demanded. “You’re the only one who can. You’re the one who can save me.”

“I can’t save _anyone!_ ”

It burst out of Stiles like a boiler blowing a pressure valve, like the words were ripped from his throat against his will. The guilt in his scent was overwhelming, dark and bitter and helpless. Stiles’ chest heaved with the force of it and there were tears on his face now.

“I couldn’t save Allison,” he said, voice cracking. “I couldn’t save Scott. Not my mom, or my dad, I couldn’t—”

He made a strangled sort of sound in his throat, one that made Derek’s heart clench in his chest. Derek stepped forward, but Stiles shook his head again, backing out of range.

“God, you _saw_ what I did back there,” he said, pointing a shaking finger toward the alley and everything it held. “All I can do is break things. I ruin things, okay? I _destroy_ them and I get people hurt or – or killed, and I don’t want to kill you, Derek. Do you understand that? It would be so fucking easy, and I can’t be responsible for killing you. I _can’t_ —”

Derek caught hold of Stiles’ hands, tight enough to keep Stiles from pulling away again, and dragged him in close even as he fought against it.

“Stop it,” he said. “Stiles, just _stop._ You’re not going to kill me.”

“One wrong move from me and you’re dead,” Stiles said and it almost sounded like he was talking to himself, reminding himself of every way it could go wrong. “I fuck it up even the tiniest bit and that thing kills you, and it’s _my_ fault—”

“ _I trust you._ ”

Stiles stopped. He stopped talking, stopped struggling, stopped breathing. His mouth hung open around a word he hadn’t finished saying and, for the first time since Allison had fallen, he met Derek’s eye directly.

“I trust you, Stiles,” Derek said again, softer.

A shaky breath fell from Stiles’ lips. They were close enough that Derek could feel it against his own, their hands caught between their chests.

Stiles asked, “Why?”

“Because I’ve seen what you can do,” Derek told him. Stiles’ gaze strayed over his shoulder, back toward the alley, and Derek shook his head. “Not that,” he said. “I don’t care that you can break things, Stiles. Like you said: breaking is easy. Anyone can do that. But _you._ You can fix them too, and that makes all the difference.”

Stiles opened his mouth to protest, but Derek didn’t give him the chance.

“You put Braeden back together this morning,” he said. “You repair people every day. It’s what you do. And you’re damn good at it! I’ve only known you for a few days and I can see that.”

Stiles looked away, his throat working around a thick swallow. Derek could feel the tremors running through him. He shifted his grip to take Stiles’ hands more firmly in his own, bring them to rest flat against his chest.

“You’ve already helped me once,” Derek reminded him. “And you didn’t kill me then, did you?”

Reluctantly, Stiles shook his head. His bottom lip was caught between his teeth and it flushed pink when he released it.

“That was different though,” he said. “That was—”

“You’ve done your studying, Stiles,” Derek cut in, leaving no room for dispute. “You’ve memorized the specs and had your time to prepare. Now all you have to do is do it.”

He brought one hand up to cup the back of Stiles’ neck, pulling him in close until their foreheads were pressed together. Stiles came willingly.

“Maybe you couldn’t save Allison,” Derek whispered into the scant space between them. “Or Scott, or your parents, or anyone else you might be thinking of. But you can save me.”

The morning before, when Stiles had deactivated the rem-dac’s diffusion mechanism, Derek hadn’t felt anything beyond the alleviation of pain, the sudden lack of the burn that had plagued him since he’d escaped from the facility. But he felt it this time.

It was like a nudge against his sternum, only from the inside. Something in him moved, and something else shifted to accommodate it. Stiles palm against his chest was blazing hot and sparking with an energy that was so different from anything Derek had felt before. He was used to electricity bringing pain, but this was soothing and exhilarating at once, even with the flayed open feeling that came with knowing that some small, intangible part of Stiles was inside of him. The idea wasn’t half as frightening as it used to be. And he couldn’t blame Stiles for wanting to plug in sometimes, not if it felt anything like this.

There was no abrupt end to the sensation like there had been with the diffusion. The feeling of Stiles’ power just ebbed away until there was nothing but the gentle pressure of his hand and the puff of his breath across Derek’s cheek. But Derek knew it was done. The device was still there, yes, but it was no danger to him any longer. And with it disarmed, it could eventually be removed without the worry of it self-destructing.

It was over. It was fucking _over_ and the facility had no power over him anymore. He was finally free of that place, and that was more of a high than anything else.

Kissing Stiles wasn’t a decision that he had thought through. One second he was flying, riding the wave of relief and euphoria, and the next he had Stiles’ lips against his, soft and warm and yielding. The noise Stiles made into his mouth was startling, even as it sent a thrill through him. Derek pulled back with a noise of his own, breathing hard. Stiles was too.

For a long while, the two of them just looked at each other, suspended in the uncertainty of the moment. Then a cough came from somewhere behind Derek and the tension broke like a rubber band stretched too far, snapping back hard enough to sting. Stiles blinked at him dumbly until Braeden cleared her throat again and the two of them finally turned to see her with her arm around Kira, who looked pale and drawn but otherwise steady.

Braeden raised an eyebrow at them but didn’t react in any other way to what she had walked in on. “Are we good to go?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Derek managed. With more difficulty than he would’ve expected, he let his hand fall away from Stiles’ neck and stepped back. “Yes, we’re, uh…good.”

“Good,” Stiles echoed him. Then he seemed to rally. A hard shake of his head, a roll of his shoulders, a heavy breath. “Everything’s good,” he said more firmly. “We should move. Where are we headed?”

“We’ve got one more overnight stop,” Kira told him. “We should make it to the wall tomorrow.”

“Lead the way,” Derek said.

She did and he followed in her wake with Stiles at his side.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The safehouse Kira led them to wasn’t much different from Mason’s. The last of the diffuse evening sunlight had long since disappeared by the time they reached it and the man who opened the door for them had a pinched look on his face.

“You’re a little late,” he said as the door locked behind them. “Run into trouble on the way here?”

“You could say that,” Braeden muttered.

“We’re okay, Jordan,” Kira said with a weak smile.

It wasn’t particularly convincing, but Jordan’s eyes—around the golden thermal scan mods, same as Kira’s—were kind and he didn’t push for answers. He just offered them a late meal and made the same apologies that Mason had about there only being one bed set aside for the fugitive.

“That’s okay,” Stiles said, waving a hand. “We don’t mind sharing. Do we, Derek?”

His tone was light, almost joking, but he waited for an answer nonetheless. There was a strange feeling in Derek’s gut as he shook his head, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. The corner of Stiles’ mouth quirked up and the feeling intensified. Derek looked away, face hot.

Dinner that night was a more subdued affair than it had been yesterday. After the day’s events, everyone was exhausted and wrung out. They ate quickly, mostly letting Braeden carry the burden of making small talk with their host, who really did strike Derek as a nice guy, and nobody objected when Derek said he was going up to bed.

Like at Mason’s, there was a small bathroom across the hall from the bedroom, and Derek took advantage of it to wash off the grime of a long day’s travel. He found a rip in the side of his shirt and a smear of dried blood underneath from a wound he hadn’t even noticed, now long since healed. He was almost certain the blood on his pants wasn’t his, but he couldn’t remember if it had come from Allison or from the Enforcer that had killed her. He wasn’t sure which option he would prefer.

He stayed in the shower long enough for the water to run cold, just breathing and trying not to think. There was too much in his head that he couldn’t make sense of and it all swirled together into a mess of thoughts and feelings as tangled as Danny’s web of cords and cables back at Lydia’s hub. He didn’t want to deal with any of it right now. Mostly, he just wanted to sleep.

Also like at Mason’s, Stiles was waiting on the only bed when Derek crossed the hall. He was sitting on the edge instead of lying down, hands twisting in his lap, and he looked up as Derek came in. His eyes traced over Derek’s bare chest, but Derek had thought to put his pants back on first this time, a moment of forethought for which he was very glad.

“Hey,” Stiles said.

“Hey,” Derek answered.

After a moment where neither of them had anything to follow that up with, Stiles shifted in his seat and said, “You really don’t mind that I told Jordan we would share the bed, do you? Because I can take the floor this time, if you want. I mean, we shared last night and it was fine, eventually, but that was before and I don’t know if things are different now or what but if you’re not comfortable with it anymore then I can just—”

“I don’t mind,” Derek cut in.

“Oh.” Stiles licked his lips—lips that Derek had kissed not too long ago. “Okay.”

Derek had a sudden, worrisome thought: “Do _you_ mind?”

“No!” Stiles said quickly. “No, of course not.”

“Okay.”

Silence prevailed and it was nothing short of _awkward._ Derek hadn’t thought he would live to experience awkwardness again, and honestly he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad development in his life.

Even before the facility, he’d never really done this sort of thing. There weren’t many romantic opportunities for werewolves who were trying to keep their heads down and not attract Enforcer attention. Stiles had to have had the same problem, what with how long his warrant had been active.

Derek wondered if Stiles had ever kissed anyone before, or if it had been his first too.

Before the quiet could become truly painful, Stiles stood up. He took one step forward, and then another. That was all it took to bring him face to face with Derek. He lingered there, maybe waiting to see if Derek would step back, put distance between them again.

Derek didn’t back down, not even when Stiles leaned in so very slowly to press their lips together.

It was simpler than their last kiss had been. Gentler. And it brought with it that same off-kilter feeling, a sort of swoop in his stomach.

“Is this okay?” Stiles asked without moving away, still close enough for their lips to brush against each other.

“I think so,” Derek said.

Stiles laughed. The sound was warm and fond and it pulled a smile onto Derek’s face. He ducked his head to hide it. The motion left his nose tucked just behind Stiles’ ear. His scent was strong there, sharp and fresh underneath the musk of travel and battle and emotion. Derek breathed it in deep; he figured he was allowed to do that now.

Long fingers brushed across the nape of Derek’s neck, carding through the damp hair there and sending a shiver through him. It felt good, better than anything he had experienced in a long time. Just the sensation of someone else’s skin warm against his own stole the strength from his spine and made his knees weak in a way that might have been embarrassing if he’d had the wherewithal to care just now. Instead he swayed into Stiles’ touch.

“Seems like you’re even more tired than me,” Stiles said, his voice a low rumble that Derek could feel in his own chest. “How’s that fair, huh? Pretty sure _I_ did all the heavy lifting today.”

Derek snorted, but there were two half-dismembered Enforcers that said he couldn’t dispute the point.

He let Stiles push him down onto the bed and waited there while Stiles kicked off his shoes and turned off the light. He was already well on his way to sleep by the time the mattress dipped with Stiles’ weight as he slid in beside him and a blanket was tossed over them both. He still rolled over to face the wall, but this time Stiles pressed in close to his back, an arm creeping tentatively over Derek's waist like he was unsure of his welcome.

Derek only hesitated a moment before sinking into the embrace. It was strange, being held. Foreign and new. But as sleep rose up to claim him, he decided he didn’t mind.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so sorry this took so goddamn long, this chapter kicked my ass in so many ways. i swear i'm gonna finish this fic soon though!! it's almost done, and i promise the next chapter won't take three months.

The city wall was even bigger up close. It looked plenty tall from a distance, rising high up into the sky and throwing everything beneath it into shadow, but there was something much different about being at the base of it and having to lean back to keep the top in view.

As Derek craned his neck, Stiles came up alongside him. Stiles’ heart was beating fast, scent laden with a heady mixture of excitement and anxiety. There was fear there as well—fear of what they were doing, fear at the idea of leaving the only city they had ever known for something completely different—and Derek wished he didn’t understand that, but he did. They had no idea what was out there.

But they knew what was in here, and that was enough to make Derek reach out his hand and take hold of Stiles’.

Stiles turned to him, surprise on his face. A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He squeezed Derek’s hand, and Derek squeezed back.

“Ready to get the hell out of here, fur-face?” Stiles asked.

Derek rolled his eyes because he didn’t trust his voice not to crack if he admitted just how ready he was to be free of this place.

“Don’t get ahead of yourselves,” Braeden said as she brushed past, eyes roving the area nonstop for any sign of hostile parties. “We’re not quite there yet.”

They were so close though. They’d left Jordan’s safehouse before the sun had even finished rising, early enough that Stiles—as the only one of them without enhanced sight of one kind or another—had had to hold onto Derek’s arm to make sure he didn’t get lost, even with the faint glow of the striplights set into the sidewalks.

It had been much slower progress than the two previous days, with Braeden’s recon trips going only a few blocks forward at a time before she returned to lead them down the cleared path, all of them anxious and jittery and waiting for more Enforcers to pop out around every corner. After the fight the day before, there was no way they weren’t being actively hunted down now.

And yet they hadn’t encountered anyone. Braeden’s connection to the Enforcer’s comms system—only still functional because of some tweaking Stiles had done years ago to make it so that her connection was undetectable—gave them advance notice of where the Enforcers were most heavily concentrated, and they skirted around those areas with extreme prejudice. Now here they were, at the base of the wall, with no enemies in sight and nothing more to stop them.

Nothing but the wall itself.

“So—” Stiles drew the syllable out obnoxiously. “—how exactly are we getting through this thing? Because I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to just waltz on out the door.”

Braeden shot him a flat look over her shoulder. “Course not, plug-head.”

“Hey!” Stiles said, highly offended. “ _You’re_ the plug-head!”

Derek snorted. Stiles tried to give him an indignant look too, but he couldn’t pull it off when even _he_ had to acknowledge what a lame comeback that had been. With a huff, he took his hand back from Derek so that he could cross his arms over his chest instead.

“No, but really, how are we getting through?” he repeated.

Kira appeared at Stiles’ shoulder, sword still in hand from scouting the area. The sound it made as she collapsed it made Stiles startle and one of his arms nearly whacked her in the face as he whipped around to face her. Any other time she might’ve laughed, or apologized for the fright, but today the tension in her frame and on her face didn’t budge.

“We’ve got an insider,” she told him. “Maintenance man. Knows the codes, knows the blackout schedule. Now come on, before we lose our window.”

Kira stowed her sword in her belt and led the way onward. Derek and Stiles exchanged one last nervous look before falling in behind her and Braeden took up the last position at the rear of the party, watching their backs.

From a distance, the wall looked like a single solid plane. In reality, the structure was almost terraced, a series of high platforms with the widest at the base and growing narrower and narrower with each successive platform as it climbed skyward. As they got closer, Derek began to pick out hatches and portal doors ranged along the higher levels, the ones high enough up that staircases had given way to ladders set into the wall’s surface.

It was one of the staircases they were heading for now, a long set of steps that climbed steeply from the ground to the platform. Derek had never thought himself particularly afraid of heights, but even he was glad for the handrails.

Stiles was even more so, if his white-knuckled grip on them was any indication. He kept climbing though, matching Kira step for step.

“Blackouts,” he said suddenly, and Derek was willing to bet it was a way for Stiles to distract himself from their growing distance from the ground. “You said something about blackouts, a blackout schedule. What’s that?”

“They’re for maintenance purposes,” Kira called back over her shoulder, not slowing her ascent at all. “The wall’s a delicate machine and it needs a lot of upkeep, but they can’t ever take the whole thing offline. So they take it offline in sections, a piece at a time, to fix any problems that come up.”

“Rolling blackouts,” Stiles said, a little out of breath. “In a regular pattern?”

“Semi-regular,” Braeden corrected him. “Our inside man knows the schedule. He knows when which section will be disconnected from the grid and for how long.”

“And that’s our window,” Derek guessed. “That’s the only time he can sneak us through without the alarms going off.”

Which was why they were so concerned with not falling behind or being delayed by too much. If they missed that window, they would have to leave and come back whenever the schedule next allowed. And with the high priority warrants they all had out for them, and the city being on high alert after the Enforcers Stiles had killed, the chances of them making it back to a safe place to wait it out were slim to none.

The staircase let out on a wide walkway: the top of the lowest terrace. Unfortunately, the walkway did not have the same handrails, or anything at all to guard against the long drop. Derek couldn’t fight the curious urge to lean forward over the edge. It was dizzying, looking down and seeing the ground so far away, especially after living the majority of his life on first and second level. Stiles, for his part, pressed himself against the wall as far from the edge as he could manage, but Kira and Braeden paid it no mind.

“Come on, you big baby,” Braeden said, snagging Stiles by his shirt and dragging him toward the next staircase. He groaned but didn’t put up more than a token protest, especially when Derek stepped up to steady him with a hand on his back.

They climbed quietly this time. These stairs were just that much steeper than the last set, that much narrower, and as they got higher and higher, the wind was picking up. It buffeted them, pushed them this way and that, made their eyes sting and water. They didn’t get strong winds like this on the ground; the infrastructure was too dense, too many buildings in the way.

Derek tightened his grip on the handrail, ducked his head, and climbed on.

The next walkway they reached was thinner than the one below but just as lacking in guardrails. It led them to the first row of portal doors though, set back into the wall by a few feet at even intervals. Stiles gave them a hopeful look, but Kira shook her head with a grimace and pointed to another staircase.

“Oh my god,” Stiles said faintly. “How far up are we going?”

“Just one more level,” Braeden promised.

Derek was extremely grateful for that because the next set of stairs—the last ones before they were replaced by ladders—were uncomfortably tight and the wind was loud enough to make his ears hurt. And he had the feeling that nothing would get Stiles up another level short of one of them actually _carrying_ him; the human was panting, dragging himself forward by the handrails, and throwing more and more frequent glances toward the distant ground.

The next platform when they reached it was barely six feet wide from the wall to the ledge, just a thin path stretching along the wall as far as they could see in either direction. Derek had no desire at all to look over the edge this time. He was more preoccupied with the skyscape, with looking out over his entire world in miniature. Everything but the tallest buildings on first level looked small from up here and the people were ants, they were _nothing._

No wonder all the big-shots in the fancy high rises of the city center thought the rest of them were insignificant, if this was their regular view. From up here, everyone looked like nothing.

A screeching, grinding noise got Derek’s attention.

This walkway wasn’t lined with keycoded portal doors like the one below, but with hatches, each one almost wider across than the walkway was deep. Braeden had taken hold of the rotary wheel set in the center of the door panel and was cranking it open. Her hydraulic joints whined with the force it took to make the heavy metal move, but with a little extra push from Kira, the mechanism gave way and the whole thing swung open.

Derek shuddered as he passed through the opening and into the enclosed space beyond, trying not to think about the tons of steel and chrome and whatever else weighing down on them from above. They were inside the wall now, closer to _out_ than he had ever been, but also deeper in the metaphorical belly of the beast than he had ever wanted to be.

The abrupt end to the wind left him feeling suddenly warm, at least, and a little off-balance. Stiles too let out an unsteady breath of relief, rubbing at his arms to get the feeling back into them.

The women didn’t look nearly as relieved. In fact, for whatever reason, Kira looked downright alarmed. Braeden’s hand retracted with a whir, her machete apparatus sliding into its place, and a thrill of dread crept up the back of Derek’s neck.

“He should be here,” Kira said.

“Your inside man?” Derek asked.

Braeden nodded and said, “He always meets us here.” Her sharp eyes roved around the space, but there wasn’t that much to look at.

It was maybe twelve feet wide and twenty deep, mostly empty. The walls were lined with panels and screens, ports and knobs and buttons—the controls for this section of the wall, not that Derek knew what any of them did. The walls gave way to maintenance tunnels leading off to either side as far as Derek could see, presumably connecting this section to the adjacent ones.

On the far end of the room was another door, but this one didn’t look anything like the one at their back. There was no rotary mechanism, for one, no handle to open it. Instead there was another computerized interface, complicated enough to make Derek’s head hurt just looking at it.

“Now what?” he asked, eyeing the door warily. “Do either of you know how to work this thing?”

“No,” Kira said tightly. “Only Finstock can get it open. He should be here to let us through.”

“Maybe he’s just late?” Stiles said, though he sounded like he didn’t have much hope of being right.

The alternative wasn’t something Derek wanted to consider. The thought of it already had the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end and his claws itching to come out. Just being in this place made him nervous, jumpy. Smelling the other’s anxiety didn’t help, along with the sharp scent of the pristine metal all around them, underlying everything.

“He’s never late,” Kira insisted. “If Finstock isn’t here, then something went wrong. Normally I would say this is the time to abort the mission, but—”

“We’ll never make it back,” Braeden said, grim but practical as always. “With the Enforcers out en masse, there’s no way we can get back to a safehouse without being caught.”

 _And killed,_ she didn’t say, but they all heard it loud and clear.

“So, what?” Derek asked with a helpless shrug. “We wait here and hope he shows? Or we take our chances out there?”

“Or,” Stiles cut in, “I can try to open it.”

All three of them turned to stare at him, but he didn’t take it back. His eyes were on the closed door in front of them and his fingers twitched against his thighs with that same sort of restless energy he always exhibited, only underscored by something that felt like determination. He licked his lips, swallowed hard, and look to Derek.

“Stiles, this isn’t another mod,” Derek said haltingly. “Or even a rem-dac. It’s the city wall. It’s the most complicated piece of tech in the—”

“It’s still just a machine like any other,” Stiles argued. “It’s moving parts, and I can move those parts myself, make them do what we need.”

“If you know what they are,” Derek countered. “You told me yourself: you need to know the device inside and out before you can manipulate it.”

“I know,” Stiles said, fidgeting ramping up another notch with his agitation. “Which is why I need to get inside the wall.”

“We’re already inside the wall,” Braeden pointed out with a wave toward the ceiling, where the rest of the structure towered over them. Stiles made a noise of frustration and pushed past her to the door. He laid a hand on its interface.

“I mean, in here!” He ran a finger over a port. “If I plug in here,” he said, “I should be in deep enough to view the whole structure from the inside. And if I can see it all, then I can do it.”

“How deep would you have to go to do that?” Braeden asked, a frown creasing her forehead.

Stiles grimaced, heart rate ticking up. “Real deep,” he admitted. “Like, Danny deep.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Derek asked, thinking of dozens of cables and solid blue, unblinking eyes and the detached monotone of Danny reciting the results of his involuntary data search. He remembered the panic in Lydia’s voice when Stiles had threatened to unplug him. “Being forcibly disconnected when you’re wired in like that can be dangerous, can’t it? Fatal, even?”

“Then don’t let me get disconnected,” Stiles told him. His attempt at a smile was sort of pitiful and it slid off his face when Derek didn’t smile back. “It’s this or wait to get killed,” he said. His voice cracked, just a bit. “At least this way we have a chance at getting out, right? At finding Scott and Cora?”

Derek swallowed around the obstruction in his throat, past the flutter of his pulse that said this was too risky and Stiles shouldn’t do anything that could get him hurt. That Derek didn’t want Stiles getting hurt.

But Cora was on the other side of that door. Somewhere out there was his little sister, and Stiles’ brother, and the possibility of a life for both of them that they would never get if they stayed here or turned back.

Stiles’ eyes were on him, dark and steady.

“I can do this,” he said. “Trust me.”

Derek took an unsteady breath, and nodded.

“Do it,” Kira said curtly, drawing the sword from her belt. “We’ll guard you.”

She and Braeden took up defensive positions, facing the open hatch and the tunnels on either side, watching for any kind of incoming threat. But Derek kept his eyes on Stiles. Stiles was skating his hands over the panels, searching for something. He finally unearthed a cord from some hidden recess and with only the slightest hesitation, he pulled it behind him and plugged it into the port at the base of his skull.

There was no flash of eye mods like there had been with Danny and Lydia because Stiles didn’t have any, but Derek could still see the second that Stiles’ consciousness was subsumed, taken out of his body and pulled along into whatever cyberspace it was that he disappeared to. His eyes went half-lidded and empty, body stiff and frozen.

Stiles was gone, and it made Derek shudder.

He turned away from the unnerving sight, ignoring the sour feeling in his gut and the growing dread that pricked at him. The wind whistled past the hatch opening and the metal room made even small noises echo, like the shift of Kira’s boots against the floor and the slight whine of Braeden’s hydraulic joints.

There was something else though, something that nagged at Derek and made his skin crawl. Not a sound, but a scent. A different kind of metallic, a coppery tang instead of steel.

No one else seemed to notice it, and even Derek’s elevated sense of smell only caught a whiff, but it was definitely there. Not in this chamber though. It was coming from somewhere to his right, further down the tunnel. The women didn’t seem to notice as he inched his way toward it, focused as they were, so he left them to their watch. It was better for both of them to stay with Stiles anyway, just in case Derek was jumping at shadows.

The tunnel was narrow and largely featureless, just a mirror of the walkway along the outside of the wall. There was the occasional intersection, other tunnels leading further into the wall instead of along its length. Derek stuck to moving slowly along the main corridor, fingers trailing along the smooth wall. This place was oppressively quiet. He didn’t bother fighting his claws when they dropped; if anyone found them here, in an area they definitely weren’t allowed to be in, it wouldn’t matter that he was a loose werewolf anyway. No point in hiding.

Finally, Derek drew up short at one of the offshoots. The scent was stronger that way. Derek glanced back, the main chamber almost out of sight already. He could still hear three heartbeats though—two alert-quick and one sluggish but steady—so the others were still there. They would be fine for a few minutes, just long enough for Derek to find the source of that smell.

Around the the corner, he found it, along with another alarmingly slow heartbeat. A man in a white jumpsuit was sprawled out on the floor, his dark hair a spiky mess and a smear of red along his forehead: blood, coppery and sharp in Derek’s nose now.

Dropping to his knees beside the man, Derek saw that there was a name tag sewn into the front of his uniform. Finstock, it said. This was the maintenance worker in charge of this section, their inside man. This was who was supposed to let them through. He wasn’t just late or delayed. He had been attacked.

That meant that someone had known they were coming and gotten here first to take out their ally.

It meant the others were in danger.

Derek ran. He hadn’t gotten all that far away, but the metal floors were slick and his shoes skidded as he threw himself back around the corner into the main hall. He opened his mouth to shout—the sound would carry, he was sure, give the others a few extra seconds of head start—but he didn’t get the chance.

A high-pitched shriek pierced the air, made more intense by the metallic walls all around. It rebounded over and over again and Derek collapsed, too deafened to even hear his own whimpers as he hunched over and waited for the taser or the tranquilizer or the heavy hands of the guards as they came to put him down, take him back, strap him to the table and—

_No._

There were no chains here and no orderlies. No men in white coats. This wasn’t the facility; it was the city wall, maintenance tunnels, so close to freedom. He was _out._ He was out of that place and halfway to finding his sister.

And he wasn’t the only one in danger.

Derek clawed his way to his feet, teeth clenched against the way his head felt like it was going to explode with the pressure of that sound. He stumbled forward on legs that were jerky and uncoordinated, pushing off the walls to keep himself moving forward. The shriek cut off just as Derek fell back into the chamber he’d left the others alone in.

They weren’t alone anymore.

Stiles was exactly where he had been: plugged in, one hand against the door’s interface for balance, eyes empty and distant. He didn’t seem to have even noticed the noise, he was in so deep. The others hadn’t been so lucky. Kira was on her knees, hands clamped over her ears, and Braeden—

Braeden was on the ground with Kate’s mag-boot planted in the center of her chest, the panel creaking ominously and sending sparks into the air. A small black box was in Kate’s hand, purple lights flashing along the side just like Lydia’s throat mods: a handheld sonic emitter.

She tossed it aside in favor of leaning more weight on her prey. Braeden gasped around a pained noise, struggling for the leverage to push back and finding none. The mag-boot whined, magnets fully engaged, and the cracked lights on Braeden’s chest panel flickered wildly on and off. Whatever the magnetic charge was doing to Braeden’s vital mods, it wasn’t good.

“I knew I should’ve stayed to make sure the job was done,” Kate was saying. “Criminals flock together, after all. A defector like you? I should’ve expected you’d have a renegade ‘path on hand to fix you up. My mistake.”

She ground her heel down and Braeden jerked like a puppet on a string, mod lights flickering down her arms, across her shoulder comm-pad, all the way up her neck.

“This time,” Kate said, “I’ll make sure there aren’t enough pieces left to put back together.”

She raised her plasma-gun apparatus and leveled it at Braeden’s face, slack and unresponsive now, and there was no time to hesitate.

Derek leapt forward to tackle Kate away from her target. They hit the ground hard and rolled, Derek struggling to get a solid hold of her, but the Enforcer with all her enhancements was more than a match for even an alpha werewolf. She threw off his hold before they’d even come to a stop. Derek came up in a crouch, snarling, and she stood to face him with a smile.

“You know, Brae and I go way back,” she said, tossing that blonde hair of hers and brushing lint off her shoulder. “But you and me. We have a bit of history too, don’t we, Derek Hale?”

Derek’s claws scraped against the metal floor, sparking instead of digging in. His low, constant growl echoed around them like the rumble of thunder. Kate’s smile brightened, perfect white teeth on display. It was every bit as predatory as any werewolf could manage.

“That’s right,” she said. “I remember you. You and your sisters, right?”

“ _Don’t_ talk about them,” Derek said through gritted teeth. She had no right, not when Laura was dead because of her. Not when Cora had almost died, and Derek too. All the lasers and the scalpels and the chains, the pain that had gone on and on, the nightmares he suspected would never go away, the way he shook even now no matter how much he fought against it—every bit of it was her fault.

Kate ignored him. She took an easy step toward him, hips swaying and plasma-shot gun swinging by her side.

“You gave me a good chase, you know,” she said, as if that were some sort of consolation. “But I ran you down eventually and brought you in, just like all the rest. Got you locked up exactly where you deserved to be. Big sis and little sis too.”

Flashes of blonde hair and red eyes, bright in the dark as they ran. Cora’s hand slipping out of his. Laura’s scream.

Derek shook his head, trying to dislodge the memory, and when he looked back Kate was closer, right in front of him close enough to touch. He jerked back on instinct, falling out of his crouch, and she laughed. It sent a shiver through him; he remembered that laugh too, echoing in the alleyways of second level almost as loudly as it did here and now.

“The big bad wolf is just a scared little pup,” she said, simpering, and her plasma-shot gun whined as it charged up. “I bet the facility had a lot of fun with you, but I think this time I’ll just cut out the middleman and put you down myself. How does that sound?”

Derek braced himself for the shot—braced to die, because an Enforcer couldn’t miss at this close range—but it didn’t come. A shout and blur of motion to the left: Kira, shaking off the last of the sonic blast. She knocked Kate to the side and her sword came down hard on the plasma-shot apparatus. The gun shattered, the damaged mod sputtering and smoking as the plasma core leaked its corrosive contents.

Kate lashed out with it anyway. The motion sent a spray of plasma in Kira’s direction. Derek could smell the way it burned on contact, hear the sizzle of the skin over Kira’s strangled cry of pain. Kate followed it up with a kick to the chest and Kira hit the wall _hard._ She slid down it and slumped at the base.

Kate flipped her hair over her shoulder again and looked down at her broken mod with a noise of displeasure. With a click, the whole thing disengaged, what was left of it clattering onto the floor to make way for a functional apparatus.

Before another weapon could slide into place, Derek gathered himself and leapt again. He caught her around the thighs this time. As she fought for balance, he raked his claws across the muscle, sinking in until he met with the metal and plastic that lay underneath.

Kate cried out and turned so that she could bring her other knee up under Derek’s chin. The blow knocked him onto his back and left him stunned and dizzy, head ringing. He had just enough presence of mind to roll out of the way in time for Kate’s mag-boot to slam into the ground where his chest had been, but he wasn’t quick enough to escape the grip of her newly re-equipped robotic hand.

For what seemed like the dozenth time in the last week alone, Derek found himself with fingers around his throat, dragging him into the air and cutting off his breath. Again, he struggled to pull the hand loose, but the smooth metal surface left his claws scrambling for purchase. His feet left the ground, kicking fruitlessly as he wheezed against the pressure around his windpipe.

Kate’s eye mods glowed a bloody crimson and Derek flashed his own alpha red eyes in return, for whatever good it did him. She just smiled again, wide and gleeful, and began walking. Her steps were jerky and uneven; Derek’s attack must have damaged something because the open wound was throwing sparks and that leg didn’t seem to want to support her full weight, but it didn’t stop her.

She walked him steadily backward toward the open hatch door, out of the chamber. Away from Braeden, damaged and unresponsive. Away from Kira, wounded and just beginning to stir again. Away from Stiles, still exactly where he had been, completely unaware of the danger they were in or anything that wasn’t the complex inner mechanisms of the wall, still trying to get them all out.

Derek tried to grab hold of the hatch’s rotary wheel as they passed it, maybe pull himself free, but it wasn’t enough to slow her down. Not even a solid kick to her core was enough, though it did put a sizeable dent in her chest panel that left her cooling fans whirring in protest. It didn’t loosen her hold on Derek’s throat and he was starting to feel the effects.

“You’re a hell of a specimen, Derek,” Kate said as she stepped out onto the external walkway. The wind hit them at once, a heavy blast of cold and a loud whistling in his ears that almost blocked out her words. “You know the facility still wants to get you back? They don’t get a lot of alphas there. Even with all the trouble you and your little friends have given us, your warrant still calls for retrieval.”

No. No, no, no, _no._ He couldn’t go back there. Not when he’d been so close to getting out, finding his sister, starting a life free of this godforsaken city and everything in it. How could he get this far only to end up right back where he started?

The shrill whine of panic filled up his head, drowning out the frantic pounding of his heart, the rush of blood in his ears, even the persistent wind. His lungs burned with the lack of oxygen but he lashed out anyway, desperate to break her hold, but Kate took every scratch and kick with little more than a grunt, that unnerving smile still on her face.

“I would send you back there,” she said, relentlessly pushing on, away from the relative safety of the wall. “If I had caught you yesterday, I would have thrown you back in that test tube you crawled out of and let you rot. But that was before you killed my partner.”

One more step and the ground disappeared from under Derek’s dangling feet. Held as he was, he couldn’t look down properly, but he didn’t need to see the drop to feel the sudden vertigo, the yawning emptiness beneath him. Blackness was starting to creep into the edges of his vision and he grasped at Kate’s arm for an entirely different reason now, clinging, holding on for dear life as it finally hit him that she _wasn’t_ taking him back at all.

She was going to drop him.

“I—I didn’t,” he managed to croak out with what little breath he had left in his lungs. “I didn’t kill her.”

For the first time, Kate’s smile dropped, replaced by a sneer that made the hair on the back of Derek’s neck stand on end.

“That plasma-shot was meant for _you,_ ” she hissed. “You’re the one who should be dead, not Allison. You and all those other traitors who lured her away and turned her into another filthy defector, just like they did with Brae.”

She hoisted Derek that much higher, shaking him over the abyss. The motion left him dizzy and faint, the world spinning around him alarmingly. It took him a second to realize the movement he saw over Kate’s shoulder wasn’t due to the fact that he still couldn’t breathe.

“I’m going to kill you,” Kate said with relish. “And then I’m going to go back in there and take care of your friends. I’m going to finish Braeden like I should’ve done years ago. And I’m going to rip that pesky little technopath of yours limb from limb.”

Kira was back on her feet, bloodied and breathing hard and with a fierce snarl on her face that said she would go down fighting.

But that didn’t stop Kate from letting go.

With the wind blowing as hard as it was, falling didn’t feel much different than dangling. It whistled around Derek, cold and needle-sharp from what felt like every direction as he tumbled down, down, _down._ Everything was a jumble of silver wall and distant grey ground and the darkening sky flashing past faster than Derek could comprehend as he flailed, reached out, grasped instinctively for anything to hold onto, anything that might slow him down, might save him—

White-hot pain ripped through Derek’s left shoulder. He jerked to an excruciating stop just for a second, and then he was falling again. But this time, he managed to snag the claws of his right hand into a groove of the wall and stop himself from gaining more downward momentum.

His left arm dangled at his side, limp and useless—dislocated from the force of trying to catch his entire weight. His shoulder right wasn’t happy either, but Derek clung on, digging his claws in as deep as he could and hugging the wall as he gasped for breath. The wind blew on around him, doing its damnedest to shake him loose, and Derek couldn’t bring himself to look down and see how far he had fallen, how much closer the ground was now than it had been, how far _up_ he was going to have to climb to get back.

His shoulder burned something fierce, but Derek could already feel the way the muscles were straining to pull the bones back to where they were supposed to be and it was only a minute before the joint snapped into place with a flare of extra agony. His scream was swallowed up by the gust and there was no one else around to hear it anyway.

It took every ounce of willpower Derek had to raise the half-healed arm over his head, dig his claws into the next highest groove in the metal paneling, and hoist himself up, but he did it. And again he did it. And again, because Kira was facing Kate alone and she could be dead by now. Braeden was in no condition to defend herself either, and Stiles—

Derek climbed with a single-minded purpose that blocked out every thought about how quick a death it would be to hit the ground from this high and what he might find if he made it to the top again. The world narrowed down to one hand over the other, the burn of overworked muscles, the shriek of the wind, because that was all that mattered. He had to get back to them. He had to live long enough to find Cora. He had to get Stiles back to Scott.

He wouldn’t let any of them die like this, not after everything they’d been through. He’d let them take Cora away from him. He’d been forced to lie back and watch as they wheeled her away. He wasn’t going to do nothing again.

He hadn’t fallen too far. Another second or two and he would’ve splattered onto the walkway of the terrace below. He had caught himself just in time, but that didn’t mean that clawing his way back up wasn’t still torturously slow-going.

By the time the platform he’d been dropped off of was within reach, Derek could hear fighting. That was good; it meant someone, at least, was still alive. Derek’s arms shook with fatigue as he hauled himself bodily over the edge to collapse. Every muscle in his body burned from the strain. The leftover adrenaline of near-death left his heart pounding in his chest and his breath coming in gasps. Now that he had a solid surface beneath his feet again, he could barely find the strength to lift his head.

Through the open hatch door, he could see Kate and Kira. Kate’s damaged leg was still sparking and uncooperative, chest panel similarly damaged, and she had blood on her face now as well. She still fought with all the unstoppable ferocity of an Enforcer though. It was a miracle that Kira had managed to hold her own for this long.

Neither of them seemed to have noticed that Derek was there. Kira’s sword wasn’t steady in her grip, but that didn’t stop it from biting deep when it made contact. It sent Kate staggering, but the Enforcer took advantage of the half-spin to build up momentum, ending the rotation with a punch that had all the strength of her hydraulic joints behind it.

The comm-pad in Kira’s shoulder cracked with a mechanical whine of protest that Derek could hear even over the continued howl of wind around him, and her back and head left matching dents in the wall where she collided with it before crumpling to the floor, unmoving. Derek held his breath—waiting, praying, _begging_ for some sign of life—but he was too far away to check for a heartbeat.

Kira wasn’t getting up this time, and Braeden was still down. Kate threw them both disdainful looks, wiping blood from her lip, and then set her sights on the only person left: Stiles.

He hadn’t moved an inch. The plug at the base of his skull was still connected, eyes still glassy and vacant. Whatever he was doing inside the wall, wherever he _was_ in there, he didn’t even know that he was in danger. He had no idea that Kate was limping her way toward him on damaged and unsteady legs, scuffed and dented hand apparatus extended to take hold of him, to clamp down and—

Derek got there just as Kate got a grip on Stiles’ shoulder. He didn’t stop to think on the way Stiles jerked and gasped. He just reached for the only swatch of bare, vulnerable, human skin he could see on the over-modded Enforcer. His claws sank into the side of her neck and _tore,_ ripped it apart until it gave way to a spray of red and a wet, gurgled noise of surprise.

Kate and Stiles fell in tandem, but Derek couldn’t care about the way Kate shook and choked and clutched at her slit throat until she went still, not when Stiles wasn’t moving at all.

Derek crashed to his knees at Stiles’ side, already pulling him into his lap. He cradled Stiles’ head like he had Allison’s, only this time there was no blood to soak into his pants because Stiles hadn’t been wounded.

He had been disconnected.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Derek muttered, fingering the empty port like that would put the plug back, let Stiles disengage safely like he should’ve done. “You’re okay, Stiles. You have to be okay.”

His fingers left a smear of Kate’s blood on Stiles’ cheek, but his touch didn’t get any response. Stiles’ head rolled loosely on his neck, mouth slack and open. His heart was still beating, but that didn’t mean anything. The type of brain damage that came with forced disconnects didn’t usually affect the autonomic functions. Just the parts that made you _you._

“You have to be okay,” Derek said again, voice cracking. The echo of it seemed twice as loud after the clangor of the fight, the screaming of the wind, his own ragged breathing. “You have to get back to Scott, remember? You’re not done yet. We have to get out of here and live. Stiles, we’re so _close._ We — we were gonna have a real life together.”

Still no response. Stiles’ eyes remained closed. Braeden was unresponsive, Kira was a motionless lump, Stiles was limp in his arms, and for the first time since he had made his escape from the facility, Derek couldn’t stop the burn of tears. He squeezed his eyes stubbornly shut against them, fighting the urge to run, to just get out of this awful place and run and run and _run_ through the city until the Enforcers shot him down because he had nothing left to lose and nowhere to go. The door was still—

The door’s interface was lit up, numbers scrolling fast across all of its screens. Something in the mechanism was grinding. A heavy part shifted with a clunk and the door beeped. A simple beep and the whole thing gave way, sliding back easy as anything to show another walkway and a wash of grey sky.

Derek stared, uncomprehending. Wind whistled past the new opening the same as it did the one at his back, except entirely different because that wind was _out._

“Did I do it?”

Stiles’ voice was weak, barely a croak, but it was the best sound Derek had ever heard. Brown eyes blinked up at him, unfocused but present, and long fingers took hold of Derek’s wrist and squeezed.

Derek kissed him hard. There were no words in his head and his hands were shaking and this was the only thing he could think to do—in that moment, it was the only thing he wanted to do.

Stiles let out a startled noise that Derek swallowed down. He gripped tighter to Derek’s wrist and kissed back, coming away dazed but smiling vaguely. Derek smiled too and leaned in to press their foreheads together.

“Yes,” he said, breathless with it, “you did it.”

Stiles looked to the now open door. He took in the sky beyond, mouth slack with wonder. Then he smirked.

“Told you I could do it.”

Derek rolled his eyes but it did nothing to chase the smile from his face. He took the hand Stiles held out and tugged the smaller man up into a sitting position, steadying him as he swayed. He palmed at his forehead with a groan. That’s when he realized that he was lying halfway in a pool of blood that wasn’t his; Kate lay exactly where she’d fallen, blessedly dead, and Stiles stared down at her in shock.

“What the hell did I miss?” he asked.

“Guess I did the heavy lifting this time,” Derek said. The huff of laughter that comment earned sent a spike of warmth through him, but it didn’t last long. The scent of burned flesh was still strong, even under all the blood, and his smile faltered. “Well, he said, “I did some of it. The rest…”

Stiles followed his gaze to Kira and then to Braeden. He was scrambling to his feet before Derek could offer help, already reaching to check for vital signs with this terrible, broken look on his face.

“They’re alive,” Derek said quickly, honing in on their heartbeats. “For the most part, at least. I think.”

Some of the panic faded from Stiles’ scent, but he didn’t stop his examination. Derek let him do it; it wasn’t as if _he_ knew how to help them. But Stiles might, so Derek stayed where he was, watching long fingers fly over bloody skin and dented metal, listening to Stiles mutter under his breath. He kept his focus on the heartbeats, reassuring himself as much as Stiles that they may have been hurt but they were still alive.

They were all still alive. Four steady heartbeats.

Five heartbeats and footsteps.

The wild-haired man in his white uniform came careening out of the side tunnel, just barely stopping himself before he ran Kira over. Derek and Stiles blinked at him in surprise, and Finstock blinked back, taking in the tableau before him. Then:

“The blackout is gonna roll over soon,” he barked. “You bunch got six minutes to get the hell out before alarms start going off, so I better—”

His eyes fell on the door, already open, and his face twisted up in befuddlement.

“Hey,” he said plaintively. “That’s usually my part! Which of you losers is out for my job?”

“Neither of us,” Stiles assured him. “But we could still use a little help.”

Under Stiles’ hands—and Derek should’ve known he wouldn’t take time to rest and recover, not when he could help—Braeden was already weakly stirring, mod lights blinking back on one by one. With a helping hand from Finstock and some supplies stolen from his med-kit, they had Braeden on her feet, bleary and leaning heavily on Stiles to stay upright, and Kira hoisted up in Derek’s arms, still unconscious but stable as far as they could determine.

With two minutes to spare, Stiles and Braeden staggered out onto the walkway, already grumbling about stairs. Derek hesitated in the doorway, his pulse loud in his ears as he looked out at the walkway’s edge and whatever was beyond it. He couldn’t really see anything from where he was, but mere knowledge that it had to be different from what lay behind him had his breath catching in his throat.

One more step and he was free.

Before he could take that last step though, Finstock called him back.

“I don’t want them thinking I was in on it, you know?” he said with a shrug, tugging on his wild hair. “Gotta maintain my cover.”

“Of course,” Derek said.

“Just do it quick,” Finstock said solemnly.

Derek’s punch knocked him out cold, leaving him sprawled out on the ground halfway into the maintenance tunnel, and the door slip helpfully shut behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> The body dysmorphia tag refers a device that has been implanted in Derek's chest without his knowledge or permission. Having it there is very distressing for him and on a few occasions he thinks of clawing it out himself, though he never acts on that impulse.
> 
> The recreation drug use tag refers to a practice called shocking whereby people with electronic modifications to their body can plug in to a power source to get high (ie buzzed). Stiles is known to plug in occasionally but not excessively. He is not shown to do so within the story, but others are.


End file.
